Iran shows its hand as real menace to Western world

Humiliated on the battlefield and stripped of its imminent nuclear potential, Iran has confirmed why it is legitimately considered to be a credible threat to global peace and security. In the hours following the destruction of its nuclear facilities by US bombers, two immediate challenges have appeared. First is the potential threat to global economic stability if Iran were to follow through with the instructions from its parliament to disrupt the supply of oil from the Middle East through the Strait of Hormuz. The second is the possibility that Iran will awaken sleeper cells in the West and resume the terror campaigns that reached a height during the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein.

What must never be forgotten is the fact Tehran was the key architect and funder for the wave of terror and roadside bombings that destabilised reconstruction efforts in Iraq and brought death to the West. Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels, have spread misery to Palestine and Beirut and led directly to the current war with Israel.

Iran, meanwhile, has strengthened its malevolent ties with Russia and China as part of a co-ordinated challenge to the US and its allies. In short, as Chris Mitchell wrote on Monday, Iran, once a thriving country with thousands of years of proud Persian heritage, is led by fanatical clerics who hate women, reject the democratic West, publicly advocate for the destruction of Israel and openly support Adolf Hitler and his Final Solution.

Iran reportedly issued a direct threat to Donald Trump at the G7 meeting in Canada last week that it would re-energise terrorist sleeper cells in the US if Washington assisted Israel in destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. That threat was the reason the US President left the G7 meeting early to make preparations for the Operation Midnight Hammer assault that reportedly has knocked out Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities. In response, Iran reflexively turned to Russia for support. Russia has strong military ties to Iran and a vested interest in any disruption to global oil supplies that would lift the price of crude oil. China, by comparison, has much to lose from a dislocation of global energy markets.

The bigger threat – and one on which Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Vladimir Putin’s Security Council, has speculated in the wake of the strike – is that another country will provide Iran with the nuclear capability it has been denied. “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads,” Mr Medvedev wrote in a statement posted on Telegram.

On the evidence, the Albanese government has been too slow to appreciate the stakes or declare exactly where it stands. Anthony Albanese was at pains on Monday to emphasise that the bombing had been “a unilateral action taken by the United States”. As foreign affairs and defence correspondent Ben Packham observed, it took a staggering 24 hours for the Albanese government to back the US’s surgical strikes on Iran to prevent the rogue state getting nuclear weapons. On Sunday there was no word from the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister Penny Wong but an equivocal statement calling for “de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy”, delivered via an unnamed spokesman.

At Monday’s press conference, Mr Albanese suggested the government had backed the strikes all along. He said the federal government had been “upfront” about the challenge facing the international community, the threat posed by any Iranian nuclear program and risk of escalation. The government had called on Iran to come to the table and abandon its nuclear program. Mr Albanese said it had been very clear for some time, including at the G7 meeting, that Iran had an opportunity to give up its nuclear weapons program. “They chose not to and there have been consequences of that,” he said. Mr Albanese correctly accepted that Iran was refining stocks of uranium to a level with no credible civilian purpose. In doing so he rejected the misrepresentations that had been made about evidence given by US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on March 25. The intelligence community had assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader (Ali) Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”. However, Ms Gabbard also said there had been “an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran of discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatuses”. Ms Gabbard confirmed: “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest level and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

Mr Albanese’s belated comments on the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities put Australia back where it should always have been: on the same page as our major allies. But it does not explain why it was such a difficult or protracted process. Nor does it account for why, as a Five Eyes security partner with the US, we were not told in advance of what was planned, as was Britain. Through prevarication, posturing and miscalculation, the Albanese government has done the nation a disservice in its failure to properly grasp across many months the significance or extent of events unfolding in real time in the Middle East.