Trump, Iran, Israel and the unknown path to peace: Andrew Kenny

Key topics:Israel’s precision strikes expose Iran’s internal vulnerabilitiesWestern outrage differs starkly after US bombing vs Hamas attacksIran's nuclear ambitions remain uncertain amid renewed tensions.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Andrew Kenny*.I am as confused as everybody else about events in Iran – not only confused about what’s going on but whether I approve of it or not, or whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, or whether it might even bring peace or worsen the conflict. At the time I completely disapproved of Donald Trump’s bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran; I thought the USA should keep out of any war between Israel and Iran. I expected violent retaliation from Iran and international outrage. Neither happened.The reaction of Iran, despite feeble, obligatory warnings of terrible reprisals, was meek and even conciliatory. There was minimal international outrage, far less than there had been on 7 October 2023 when the hated Jews had dared to pose as victims after 1,200 Jewish men, woman, and children had been raped, tortured, and slaughtered by Hamas terrorists. “Gas the Jews” and similar antisemitic hatred had been chanted in Western capitals around the world then.Now, when the leader of the Great Satan, the USA, drops gigantic bombs on Iran, a country with which he is not at war, there is no such expression of anti-Western or anti-Jewish hatred. Does this mean that the privileged youth of the West only despise it when they feel it is weak and tolerant but admire it when it uses massive, brutal force?I support Israel even though I am fully aware of her faults and black events in her modern history. I support her democracy and her full expression of human rights in a region where neither exists elsewhere. I admire her toughness, resourcefulness, and industry. I am constantly amazed at her military successes. I was a student at UCT in 1967 when the Six-Day War happened. I was astonished at the swift and total victory of Israel over several bigger and better armed Arab neighbours.AstonishedI am more astonished at her shattering, precision strikes against Hezbollah to her north and against the Iranian theocratic tyranny of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So it seems were Hezbollah and the Iranian leaders. Israeli intelligence failed completely on 7 October but is otherwise excellent. Israel’s precise knowledge of the locations of Iran’s important weaponry and military leaders, both of whom she hit with devastating accuracy, could only come from superb intelligence, which could only come from a network of spies drawn from the local community – which means drawn from the majority of Iranian people who hate and fear their cruel rulers and would welcome anyone who wants to kill them. This is a problem Israel does not have.Israel is a vigorous democracy, which means there is loud criticism of any Israeli government by Israeli people and opposition parties, which are allowed to operate freely and fully. There are furious Israeli demonstrations against their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. But the Israeli people never spy against Israel for foreign countries. In Iran, it is the other way round. There is no democracy, no approved outlet for public opposition to the ruling theocracy, and so dissent is pushed dangerously underground.The Mullahs are well aware of this, which makes them paranoic about it, which makes them crush criticism even more anxiously, which makes the spy network against them even more determined and potent. During Israel’s attacks on Iranian military targets, on weapons and generals, there were reports of loud cheering among the Iranian people, who welcomed the killing of their oppressors. After the Israeli attacks, the Iranian authorities carried out a wave of arrests and executions of people suspected of links to Israeli intelligence agencies; they believed, no doubt rightly, that there had been “an unprecedented infiltration of Iranian security services by Israeli agents”.The Iranian authorities must also be aware that many, perhaps most, of her Arab neighbours, who are mainly Sunni, are secretly delighted with the attacks on her by Israel and Trump, although none would admit it in public. Iran’s leaders must know they have few true friends in the region. I have heard countering views about Iran’s part in the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October. Some commentators said that Iran had nothing to do with it.Others said Iran instructed Hamas to make the attack; the reason was that Iran was worried about the likely success of the Abraham Accords, promoted by Trump in his first presidency, which normalised diplomatic relations between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain, perhaps to be followed by Saudi Arabia. Iran feared that these Sunni countries were ganging up with Israel against her – which they probably were. So she ordered Hamas to attack Israel, believing this would upset a peaceful settlement, which it certainly did. I don’t know which to believe.In the Daily Friend of the last two weeks I have read several intelligent, well-informed authors expressing wonder and puzzlement at recent events in Israel and Iran. One mentioned that when Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran in 1979 and proclaimed an Islamic Republic, he vowed to destroy Israel. The writer says this was surely unique: to make the primary task of a new republic the destruction of a country over 1,700 km away. I thought about this..Read more:.The Economist: How the Arab world sees the Israel/Iran War - a spectator sport with scary consequences..Perhaps it is unique but hatred as a driving force in national and international politics certainly is not. “All you need is hate” might well be the anthem of many countries and political parties. But there are different types of hatred.WorstThe worst includes Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, which was very similar to Islamic Jihadists’ hatred of Jews. Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) hated the Jews so much they were prepared to harm themselves to kill them. In the closing stages of WW2, when Germany faced probable defeat, the Nazis diverted vital resources, such as railways and personnel, away from fighting the enemy to killing Jews in their huge, expensive death camps. Jihadist suicide bombers kill themselves in order to kill Jews.The hatred of Jews by privileged young Westerners is entirely frivolous; none of them would take any risks to kill Jews. The ANC is driven largely by hatred and jealousy – of the capitalist West, of white people and of Jews – but its hatred is mixed with adoration. It hates capitalism but it just loves capitalist goodies; it hates whites but insists on white teachers for its children; it hates colonialism but demands a colonial language; it hates the West but begs the West to invest here and do trade here. And so on.The ANC’s responses to events in Israel and Iran is mainly driven by hate but of a profoundly dishonest kind, without the truly sincere hate of the Nazis and the Jihadists. The ANC backs Hamas and was pleased with its rape and murder of Israeli women and children. Dr Naledi Pandor, a senior ANC minister, communicated with Hamas immediately after 7 October; she said it was not to congratulate them on their slaughter of the innocents but I don’t think anyone believed her. The ANC’s action against Israel in the International Court of Justice was an act of cowardice and hypocrisy; it never took any such action against the Sudanese forces committing real genocide against black African people.The ANC does not particularly care for Palestinians; it just hates Israel and the West. The ANC seems utterly confused by Israel’s shattering military successes and Trump’s big bombs.What nextWhat’s going to happen now? Could Iran be bombed and assassinated into peace? Could this lead to the overthrow of the hated National Revolution Guard and the installation of a democratic regime? I don’t know but I do know that for it to happen peacefully, the Iranian people must do it for themselves. The worst possible action would be a USA invasion of Iran like her disastrous invasion of Iraq.Fortunately I don’t see Trump doing this. I hope the success of his bombs doesn’t go to his head.My special interest in all of this is nuclear. I believe that nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, most reliable form of energy in the world and very economical. This has been demonstrated all around the world. I want every country to have nuclear power if it wants but I don’t want every country to have nuclear weapons.The way to ensure this is quite feasible, with an international nuclear inspectorate, which already exists and is very successful. Nuclear power followed the nuclear bomb – wrongly called “the atomic bomb”. The bomb was developed in WW2 entirely from the fear that Hitler would develop one first. The USA tested the first successful nuclear bomb, the Trinity Bomb, on 16 July 1945. By then Hitler was dead, Germany had surrendered but the Japanese fought on.On 4 August the USA dropped one nuclear bomb on Hiroshima; on 9th August another on Nagasaki. The destruction was horrible but the Japanese surrendered and the war ended. The bombs had probably saved the lives of over 20 million people. Both bombs were fission bombs, where two heavy nuclei are split to release a huge amount of energy. The nuclei need to be fissile. The two most usual fissile materials are uranium, which is widely available in large quantities and plutonium which only occurs naturally in tiny quantities.Uranium consists of 99.3% Uranium-238, which is not fissile, and 0.7% Uranium-235, which is. To make a bomb you have to enrich uranium to about 95% Uranium-235, which is an extremely difficult and expensive process. To get 95% Plutonium-239, is somewhat easier, but it is much harder to make a bomb with it. Nuclear power requires low enrichment or sometimes no enrichment at all. Koeberg uses about 4.5% enrichment. No nuclear power station requires even 20% enrichment, and so the international nuclear authorities say that no nuclear power enrichment plant should enrich beyond 20%, to bombs impossible.DeniedIran has long since denied it wanted to make nuclear weapons, and it might well be right. In July 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed between Iran, the USA, the UK, Russia, China and France, which allowed Iran to develop nuclear power provided it undertook rigorous inspection by the international nuclear authorities to make sure she was not making weapons. It was an excellent plan, promoted by the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, the best thing he ever did in an otherwise undistinguished political career.It was scrapped by President Trump as soon as he came to power in 2017, which was one of the most stupid and dangerous things he ever did. Does the present tyranny in Iran want to make nuclear weapons? They are not too difficult to make once you have high enrichment. South Africa made six nuclear bombs in short time and without much fuss. They were Hiroshima–type bombs and they would all have worked. Surely Iran could have done the same if she really wanted to do so.It is undeniable that possession of nuclear weapons does have one enormous benefit: it stops anybody invading you. Nobody is going to invade the horrible dictatorship in North Korea. If Saddam had had nuclear weapons in Iraq, the USA would not have invaded. It might be that since India and Pakistan both had nuclear bombs, this stopped a dangerous skirmish in Kashmir in April this year from escalating into a fully blown war. (Mind you, possession of nuclear weapons has not stopped Israel from being attacked with missiles and assaulted by Hamas.)But otherwise the nuclear bomb draws bad attention to you and makes you liable to international sanctions and the hostility of neighbours. Maybe Trump’s conventional bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities will dampen her wish to make nuclear weapons, if she ever had such a wish, or maybe they will just encourage her to try harder to get them. I really don’t know.In fact there’s an awful lot I don’t know about how to end conflict in the Middle East. Nor does Trump. But sometimes he gets lucky, and I know he’s itching for a Nobel Peace Prize..*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal..This article was first published by DailyFriend and is republished with permission

Trump, Iran, Israel and the unknown path to peace: Andrew Kenny

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