Word out of Iran has been scarce over the last few days. The regime has engaged in hideous repression of the uprising Iranian people, and the internet, and thus the flow of information out of the country has all but ceased. That's disconcerting, but in a bit of interesting news, there are now reports that the Supreme Leader himself, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that savage barbarian theocrat out of another century, has gone underground.
Perhaps out of fear of American airstrikes?
The 86-year-old supreme leader has moved to a fortified shelter in Tehran connected to a series of elaborate underground tunnels after senior military officials warned of the increasing likelihood of an imminent US attack, Iran International reported, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Khamenei has left his youngest son Masoud Khamenei, 53, in charge of running the day-to-day management of the Islamic Republic, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Masoud Khamenei’s emergency duties include being the primary communication channel with the regime’s executive branch, according to the report.
Iran has deemed the likelihood of US airstrikes to be high after President Trump announced Friday that warships were headed to the Middle East as a warning to the ayatollah, following a continuing war of words between the two leaders in recent days.
Iran might be right about those American airstrikes. The USS Abraham Lincoln and its task group are steaming to the region, and one of our aircraft carriers and its supporting ships represents more military might than everything Iran can muster, combined.
Trump boasted Friday that the US Navy was sending a massive “armada.”
The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which includes three destroyers, is currently motoring from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf region of Iran, Stars and Stripes reported.
Publicly, Tehran has not backed down from heightened tensions with the US as Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian threatened to treat any attack against the supreme leader by the US or Israel as “an all-out war against us.”
Tehran - or, more accurately, the mullahs, including the desiccated old shouter that they call Supreme Leader, can't back down. Backing down would, to them, be seen as a sign of weakness. It would be more accurate to say that it may be the one thing that would avoid a hail of American ordnance.
Read More: Secret Service Now Alert Due to Iran's Assassination Threat
U.S. Pulls Personnel From Key Middle East Base As Iran Tensions Spike
Of course, taking out the mullahs, even allowing them to bug out to Moscow or some other place that will take them in, would be a victory for much of the known world. Imagine an Iran, or a Persia, if you like, where the mullahs are gone. Imagine the world's foremost state sponsor of Islamic terror, under new management, turning off the money spigots to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the like. Imagine an Iran with a modern parliamentary democracy, probably the best we can hope for in that part of the world.
Imagine no more mullahs.
We don't have the best idea as to how bad things are in Iran by now. Reliable information out of the Islamic Republic is, at the moment, as scarce as hen's teeth. But all that need happen is for the current regime to be tossed out, one way or another. The Lincoln task group can do them a lot of damage, very quickly, but America can't and shouldn't put boots on the ground; the Iranian people should do that. But we can provide a heck of a lot of aerial support by striking key regime targets, should it come to that.
Because JDAM means never having to say you're sorry.
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