WASHINGTON (TNND) — The end of the war, former Israeli diplomat Shahar Azani said, must be understood through what he described as the threat posed by Iran’s leadership not only to Israel but also to the United States and the wider world.
Azani, a former spokesperson for Israel’s Consulate General, described Iran as “a messianic, radical Shiite regime that chants Death to America for 47 years,” adding that “their words are not just words. They’re an operational doctrine,” in an interview with The National News Desk.
He pointed to past attacks and U.S. casualties that he attributed to Iran and its support for Hezbollah. “I want to go back to 1983, when this regime took out the lives of 241 Marines, the worst catastrophe since the Second World War,” Azani said, referring to the barracks bombing in Beirut. He also said Iran operated “all the way through the Iraq War with thousands of American servicemen and women, lost their lives and were injured by detonating bombs sent over to Iraq by this regime.”
Azani framed the conflict as “an existential essential war for the United States, for Israel and for the world,” arguing that the stakes include preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. He said Iran was “mere weeks or months away from putting their hands on” nuclear weapons, and warned that such an outcome would affect “world order,” “oil prices,” the region and “the entire world.”
Asked what the region could look like after the war, Azani said that “in June of 2025,” an Israeli attack against Iran “has been able to strip it of its impenetrable image before that war.” He said Iran had seemed “impenetrable, almost undefeatable,” but that after the war “people understood that this is a paper tiger that doesn’t only take on the entire world, but also takes on its own population.”
Azani said the current attacks are intended to “cripple the military capability of this regime to cause harm,” and to “sever its connections as its tentacles to the terrorist organizations that are spread throughout the region and the world.”
He pointed to Lebanon as an example, saying, “The Islamic Republic has been holding this country in stranglehold using its terrorist organization, Hezbollah, preventing Lebanon from executing its own sovereignty from people to live their own lives in the name of supporting and protecting Iran’s interests.” Azani added that Hezbollah’s role has become clearer, saying that “now it’s very clear that they were there for Iran, for them to protect this regime.”