The world is hurtling toward a geopolitical abyss, and Iran has become the latest arena of a reckless and deeply misguided experiment in decapitation and coercion. War was not a surprise; it was foreseen. The assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by the combined machinations of U.S. and Israeli forces is being hailed in some quarters as a surgical strike against tyranny. In reality, it is the latest episode in a playbook as old as the Iran-Iraq War itself, yet dressed in 21st-century technologies and executive hubris. Trump’s decapitation project is neither novel nor subtle; it continues a century of covert interventions, from the CIA’s orchestration of the 1953 coup against Mossadegh to the entanglements of Iran-Contra, from arming militias to pitting Kurds against fellow Iranians, and now to globalised narratives of chaos framed as “strategic advantage”.

To understand the current conflagration, one must remember that Iran has endured far worse. During the eight years of the so-called Holy Defence against Iraq, millions poured into the streets, armed with resolve rather than sophistication, singing patriotic anthems and marching for survival against a far better-equipped adversary. Today, those streets are alive again, but with a new overlay of fear, uncertainty, and international interference. Whether one accepts it or not, the global order is no longer an order; it is disorder veiled as governance.

The assault on Iran, as detailed by multiple analyses, has followed a predictable arc of overreach and miscalculation. Trump and Netanyahu, emboldened by decades of proxy wars and intelligence manipulations, assumed that eliminating Iran’s leadership would create political pliability. They underestimated the robustness of the Islamic Republic’s institutional architecture: a system of........

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