The US’s desire to pull out of the Middle East has empowered Tehran and its proxies over the last decade – is that all over now?
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN |JUNE 22, 2025
President Donald Trump and Secretaries Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth in the Situation Room, June 21, 2025. (Photo by The White House – Twitter (direct download), Public Domain)
Note this interview preceded the US attack on the nuclear facilities.
Stephen Bryen | Weapons & Strategy | Jun 22, 2025
This image grabbed from a United Nations video shows Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi addressing the 59th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 20, 2025. Top European diplomats are meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva on June 20 to discuss Iran’s nuclear program
President Trump’s decision to launch attacks on three of Iran’s major nuclear enrichment sites took place after negotiations in Geneva collapsed. Iran’s foreign minister met with the foreign ministers of Germany, Britain, France, known as the E3, plus the EU. The E-3 and EU group pressed the Iranians to engage in negotiations with the United States. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi said Iran would only consider talks of some kind (not with the United States) after Israel halted its attacks on Iran and was punished. The E-3 tried to sell Araghchi and the Iranians on a formula, not supported by Washington, that would impose strict nuclear inspections and other similar measures as a “solution” to the impasse, disregarding President Trump’s policy of no enrichment of uranium by Iran. Araghchi wasn’t buying the European suggestions.
IN A BRILLIANT, HISTORIC MILITARY STRIKE, DONALD TRUMP TOOK OUT FORDOW, ISFAHAN, NATANZ, TUCKER CARLSON, COL. DOUG MACGREGOR, DAN GREENWALD, SCOTT RITTER, TULSI GABBARD & FELLOW TRAVELERS.
Andrew Benjamin | Jun 22, 2025
CREDIT – SCREENGRAB [Resized]
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NEW YORK POST
June 19, 2025, 2:14 p.m. ET
Peloni: So, this is not about regime change…yet. Given the slaughter, brutalization and body snatching of Americans by the Khameini regime, hopefully this position by the US will change. Would any other nation in the world be allowed to carry out such wide spread murder and attacks on Americans and American infrastructure as has Iran over the years without the demand that the regime responsible for these actions be overthrown? It is a fair question to which the assertion that this is not about regime change seems quite unable to answer.
Begin playing at about 35 minutes
Michael Ordman | VGNI | June 22, 2025
In the 22nd Jun 25 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:
Bibi Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu:
“You remember that from the beginning of the operation, I promised you that Iran’s nuclear facilities would be destroyed, one way or another. This promise was fulfilled.
A short time ago, in full coordination between me and President Trump, and in full… pic.twitter.com/bL6uWA8Ze1
— Vivid. (@VividProwess) June 22, 2025
“You remember that from the beginning of the operation, I promised you that Iran’s nuclear facilities would be destroyed, one way or another. This promise was fulfilled.
Peloni: The world changed today as the nuclear ambitions of a rogue terror state to dominate the world has finally been crushed. It is with the greatest sense of gratitude that the world should give thanks to the coordination, fortitude and determined resolve demonstrated by both PM Bibi Netanyahu and President Donald Trump in rendering this long anticipated outcome into reality. Each of these men have maintained a steady resolve over the years against very powerful actors who have advocated Chamberlainesque strategies of surrender and complicity in making Iran a nuclear armed terror state. In the case of President Trump, his stalwart fixation on preventing a nuclear armed Iran forced him to ultimately contest his position even with those who claimed to support him, such as Tucker Carlson, when in fact their true intent has been to challenge his policy on this point, while raising the age old talisman of antisemitism as a footstool on which to advance their challenge. While comments by Trump’s own intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, were weaponized against him, without any vacillation, Trump refused to backpedal upon his commitment to what he knew to be the right and proper course in the pursuit of peace. Stating flatly that ‘Iran must not have a nuclear bomb’, he faced down the opposition within his own base while demonstrating the fact that his supporters supported his policy opposing Iran’s efforts of becoming a nuclear state. Due to his strength of character, his quiet resolve, and his masterfully strategic coordination with the statesman of our age, PM Netanyahu, Trump faced down these opposing voices, and together, these two men set the world on a course which will make tomorrow a safer place in which successive generations might thrive, as the precedent of preventing the efforts of rogue regimes seeking nuclear weapons has now been set.
I was promised when I voted for President Trump that Iran would
not have a nuclear weapon.Promises made. Promises kept.
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) June 22, 2025
Peloni: It is time for America to undue the betrayal dealt to people of Iran, Israel, America and the entire world when it supported the replacement of the Shah with the Islamist regime which has harvested an ongoing threat of terror and war against the world over the past nearly 50 years.
“America can’t do a damn thing against us.”
Daniel Greenfield
“America can’t do a damn thing against us,” Ayatollah Khomeini bragged while holding our hostages.
The Carter administration had undermined the shah’s government in favor of the Islamists who seized power in 1979 and then prevented the Tehran embassy’s Marine guards from defending the facility and the people inside against the Muslim “student” groups who claimed to be coming in peace.
Image: Anders Beer Wilse
For years Norway’s support for those waging terror against Israel has been official policy.
Yet “[t]here was a time when Norway rejected the PA’s terror support. When Palestinian Media Watch revealed that Norway had funded a girls’ community center that was named after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 massacre of 37 civilians, including 12 children, [Norwegian] foreign minister Borge Brende responded with moral clarity when he asserted that “[t]he glorification of terrorist attacks is completely unacceptable… We will not allow Norwegian aid to be used for such purposes… We have asked for the funds to be repaid.’”
Since Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, the Revolution, Barbary Coast, War of 1812, the United States, a neocon nation, has always intervened to advance our national interests…
Andrew Benjamin | Jun 20, 2025
?But then we have historically-ignorant narcissistic megalomaniacs who think they should decide America’s foreign policy, rather than the elected President and his Ministry of Foreign Affairs (we Americans call call it the Department of State). Indeed, these reprobates are brainwashing the naive on both sides of the political aisle. But it was never Donald Trump who threatened splitting MAGA. The two men working at splitting MAGA since the beginning are pictured below. There’s a third, with a white beard who wears a turban on his balding head.
Editor’s note. This was written before Israel’s blessed attack on Iran. Hopefully, it will still serve as support for that initiative.
By Walter E. Block
In sports, the newcomer is typically advised to keep his eye on the ball. This is crucially important in golf. Whether putting or going for long yardage, you will not do well if you take your eye off that little white sphere even for a split second. Too many golf patzers look, instead at the flight of the ball after being hit, and not sufficiently at it before contact.
In basketball, while dribbling, the last thing you want to do, paradoxically, is look at the ball. Control, there, should be automatic. But when receiving a pass, that is the be-all and end-all. Pretty much nothing else matters. Ok, ok, you don’t want to run into anyone else and be penalized for a charge. That’s why you have two eyes!
Peloni:
Peloni: The feckless nature by which Washington has dealt with the threat from Iran has had its effect in various way, and importantly, this fecklessness has thus imprinted itself upon the Gulf nations, to their own detriment. Indeed, despite the obvious and significant threat which the Iranians pose to the Gulf states, they have been happy to sit back to not only let Israel alone take on all of the challenges in dealing with the menace from Iran, but they have been seen to actively coordinated their public and diplomatic efforts to add to those challenges. While the benefit in satisfying both the radicals in their own society and the Mullahs in Tehran are self evident, this strategy provides a poor staging ground on which to anticipate the road forward towards the foundation of the IMEC in the aftermath of Israel’s dealing with the various threats emanating from Iran. Still, the twin victories of resolve and capability with which Israel has, and will continue, to punish Iran on its own will likewise provide Israel alone with a commanding position in the wake of the resolution which will come from this campaign as it faced down both the Iranians and the obfuscating efforts of the Gulf states simultaneously.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain | June 19, 2025
Flag of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf. (Photo by Rico Shen – Image:Int-GCC-flag.gif and Image:GCC Logo.svg, Public Domain)
Since 1979, Iran has been a problem for Arab Gulf capitals. Tehran has exported its radical Islamism and terrorism across the region, built loyalist militias, agitated popular opinion against Gulf governments, and pursued a nuclear weapon.
Peloni: Increasing threats against US interests emerging from Iranian proxy militias in Iraq. Notably, this is the only proxy force left to Iran which has yet to be either tested or defeated in the now 20 month war between Israel and Iran & its various proxies.
By Seth Frantzman | June 20, 2025
On June 13, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al Sudani received US Ambassador Stephen Fagin and General Kevin Leahy, the commander of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, following what the Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office called the “dangerous developments resulting from the attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran.” (Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office)
The Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia in Iraq has threatened to target “US interests” in the Middle East if the US intervenes in the Israel-Iran conflict, according to several regional Arabic reports. The New Arab reported on June 15 that the pro-Iranian group has also called for the “closure of the US Embassy in Baghdad,” which “comes as a state of anticipation and fear prevails in Iraq that the country could be dragged into a war.” CNN Arabic noted that Kataib Hezbollah commander Abu al Askari made the group’s threat.
Peloni: Daniel is precisely correct in his call to bring down the evil regime in Tehran. What comes next will be for the Iranian people to choose, as there is no one who could have a greater right than they to choose their own fate, recognizing of course that their choice in such a choosing will in fact dictate their fate.
We wanted regime change in the USSR, but we didn’t do any nation-building.
by | June 19, 2025
I am skeptical that the United States will actually do anything directly in Iran. If it does, it’s going to be limited to using some bombers to drop heavy ordnance on an underground nuclear reactor.
