IRAQ’s Saddam Hussein eliminated his opponents immediately after assuming power in 1979. At the same time, he launched fiery statements about “burning half of Israel with chemical and atomic bombs”.
This attitude was similar to that taken by Jamal Abdul Nasser in 1952 when the Free Officers Movement took control of Egypt, which was followed by the era of assassinations and imprisonment.
Typically, Abdul Nasser was fleeing from facing the reality of his weakness by launching threats against Israel and attacking Arab regimes.
The same thing happened in Libya when Muammar Gaddafi turned against King Idris Al-Senussi.
Instead of following through with his threats, Jamal Abdul Nasser sent his army to Yemen to fight.
As for Saddam Hussein, he neither burnt down half of Israel nor fired a single bullet at it. Rather, he directed what he called the “Jerusalem Army” to occupy Kuwait. At that time he launched his famous slogan – “The road to Jerusalem passes through Kuwait.”
On the other hand, Gaddafi started supporting Arab and non-Arab terrorist militias. He eventually delivered his entire nuclear program to the United States, and even that did not intercede for him, as his people revolted against him and dragged him on the streets of Libya, while Saddam ended up hanging at the gallows.
The three aforementioned Arab models are found in the Mullahs’ regime, as it follows the same principles – from suppressing dissidents at home to continuing to threaten neighboring countries and supporting terrorist militias in several Arab countries, leading to a nuclear program that Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi initiated peacefully while the Mullahs seek to transform it for military purpose to fuel an arms race in the region.
In 1967 within a few hours, the myth of Abdul Nasser’s threats to destroy Israel evaporated when 170 warplanes hovered over Egypt. In the year 1991, when the operation to liberate Kuwait began, Saddam Hussein’s plane landed in Iran, and the Mullahs considered it as a trophy, and did not return it to Iraq until after the fall of his regime, and the domination of sectarian forces that supported them.
Today, Iran is launching massive military drills on the shores of the Sea of Oman, titled “Iqtidar 99”. However, it is unable to respond to the daily Israeli bombing of its Revolutionary Guards in Syria. In other words, Iran is content with insulting Israel in return for the slaps it receives from Israel.
This Iranian impotence is comparable to the impotence of Abdul Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Tehran, which intervened five and a half years ago in Yemen, suggests through its Houthi client that it has achieved tremendous and great victories over the Arab alliance, and that the Houthi gangs are on the outskirts of Riyadh. However, the truth is that the burrows on the Sa’dah hills are full of fugitives running away from it.
As for Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah appears from time to time, threatening to destroy Israel but he does not even dare to leave his basement. In that way, he is no different from the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, who came out the day before yesterday to braggingly say, “Tehran will not accept any precondition for lifting the sanctions. If Washington wants to return to the nuclear agreement, it must return to the previous agreement signed in 2015”.
Perhaps the leaders of the Mullahs regime, who are wary of moving in Tehran either due to fear of popular anger or of physical liquidation following the operations that Israel carried out in their own backyard on the leaders of their nuclear project, should return to reading the biographies of Jamal Abdul Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. They may perhaps then reconsider their principles.
They are aware that threats and rhetoric neither enrich nor nourish from hunger, and their fate will not differ from that of the late tyrants of Iraq and Libya.
By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times
