By Hani Al-Dhahiri

Okaz

Around 13 years ago, precisely in January 2007, an American military officer lifted his hand, in the last moment, from pressing the button to launch a missile toward a vehicle somewhere in northern Iraq.

The vehicle was carrying Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force. What prompted the officer, who was tasked with a secret operation, to backtrack from eliminating him was an urgent order from his command, which found that Washington would avert the political fallouts by the cancelation of the operation and instead decided to continue surveillance on him.

This alarming information was contained in an earlier article written in The New York Times by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, retired US commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, who had been assigned with the task of surveillance on Soleimani for several years.

Here there is a relevant question: Had the plan to eliminate Soleimani been carried out in 2007, would the situation in the Middle East region have been the same as it is at present?

This is especially when considering the fact that Soleimani was the architect of many Shiite plots and actual executor of Tehran’s operations of consuming Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen all through these years.

And today, with the elimination of Soleimani, the answer for this question was quite obvious for all. It is evident that the decision to delay the liquidation of this global terrorist was absolutely the most stupid decision in the US political history vis-à-vis the Middle East.

Moreover, it portrayed the image of the United States losing its reputation as the world’s policeman throughout the last decade. This also resulted in occurrence of several funny incidents and made the US look like a small fence over which it was easy to jump over for many outfits and nations, which are thirsty of possessing the capabilities of the region.

By accomplishing the mission, which had been delayed for 13 years, US President Donald Trump — who entered the Presidential election campaign with the slogan of “Make America Great Again” — has proved ultimately that he is serious enough to regain the real US role of being the global policeman.

He has also proved that for him the red line is the real line drawn by missiles and it has no way related to the imaginary red line drawn by the weak administration of former President Barack Obama, in whose tenure Washington suffered humiliation, the like of which it had never experienced earlier.

Throughout the last decade, Iran nurtured rogue regimes and terrorist outfits in the Middle East region at the expense of a weak United States. However, it was evident now that a new phase has been reached where the sick policeman woke up from his coma.

And this should be confirmed with continuing operations to chop off the wings of the black Mullah Regime for which there are only two options left behind in the current scenario.

The first is to retract itself with abandoning all its expansionist plans, which would otherwise result in its annihilation, while the second one is to commit suicide with resorting to an insane military act that would also annihilate it forever. Both options are in the interest of the world security.