Rami Al-Khalifa Al-Ali

Iran.. The System That Devours Its Neighbors

21 July 2026 - 23:58 | Last updated 21 July 2026 - 23:58

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Since dawn on the seventeenth of July, when columns of smoke rose announcing the first American casualties, the region entered a new political era whose features unfold day by day. But understanding this era does not start from the event itself, but from the nature of the system that created it. The war raging today in the Middle East is not a conflict between two powers vying for influence, but a new chapter in an old story titled 'a system that from its birth chose to be a project of chaos, not a project of state.' For Iran, which received from the international community a rare opportunity to emerge from its isolation through the Islamabad memorandum, needed only three weeks to renege on its signature and return to its old ways, bombing commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz and turning a vital artery of the global economy into a tool of extortion. As if its fate is to master no political language but the language of hostages—hostages who were humans in the Tehran embassy in '79, and today they become oil tankers, shipping lanes, and the economies of entire peoples. Then came its crime of targeting neighboring countries to reveal the true face of this project. Targeting civilian facilities with its treacherous missiles was not a military act within deterrence calculations, but a sinful assault on sovereign Arab lands that had not declared war on anyone. The prime example is its criminal targeting of oil installations in Kuwait and water desalination plants from which civilians drink—targets that an army fighting an army does not choose, but rather a system that punishes peoples for a crime they did not commit and sees in the suffering of innocents a bargaining chip. The irony is that Tehran, which for four decades has raised slogans of resistance and dignity, has never directed its missiles at those it claims to resist as much as it has at its Arab neighbors. Wherever its hand has extended, destruction has followed—from kidnapped Beirut to devastated Sana'a to drained Baghdad. Today it tries to export its ordeal to the other side of the Gulf, where development and construction projects rise, but there it collides with a vigilant defense system and a firm will that has turned its attacks into shrapnel falling in vain. And if some analysts argue that Iran has proven its ability to endure, the deeper truth is that this alleged endurance is nothing but a system's ability to sacrifice its people indefinitely. What kind of achievement is this, achieved by burning the country's economy, isolating it from the world, and turning its youth into fuel for adventures in which they have no stake? And what kind of doctrine sees victory in every destruction and dignity in every siege? What awaits the region in the coming weeks—whether in the form of a decisive military campaign that uproots the fangs of this project or a settlement that binds it with strict restrictions—must start from a lesson that can no longer be ignored: that stability in the Middle East will not be achieved by temporarily taming Tehran's behavior, but by permanently ending its ability to threaten its neighbors. The region that presented the world with visions of development, openness, and the future can no longer remain captive to a system that excels only at creating crises. History is unforgiving to those who were given the chance for peace time and again yet each time chose the path of fire. Only the peoples who chose construction over destruction and the future over slogans will write the final chapter of this confrontation. As for the system that bet on chaos as a way to survive, it will discover, as all its counterparts throughout history have discovered, that chaos protects no one and that it devours its maker before its victims.