n a sermon carried on state TV, an Iranian cleric threatened that his country will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground and target US bases. Ayatollah Ali Movahedi-Kermani, whose Friday sermon was translated on Sunday by MEMRI, a US-based media watchdog group, spoke extensively about Iran s ballistic missile capabilities. Movahedi-Kermani claimed that Tehran would use Iranian-made Sejjil missiles against Israel as a defensive deterrent if Jerusalem ever decided to attack the Islamic Republic.

The Liberal backbencher and former army commander Andrew Nikolic, Australian politician and MP has warned that Iran presents a potentially worse threat than Islamic State (Isis), one that may require an urgent military response. Nilolic said that as Australia joined the international coalition to fight Isis, "the time for action on Iran is now much closer than it has ever been".

In an interview with NPR that was released on Saturday, Kissinger explained that because Iran has a stronger footing in the Middle East, it has a greater opportunity to create an empire. "The borders of the settlement of 1919-'20 are essentially collapsing," he said. "That gives Iran a very powerful level from a strategic point of view.

Iran has developed the capacity to destroy a U.S. warship on less than a minute s notice, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said Tuesday in comments that were met with skepticism by military experts in the West. In the latest threat that Iran s hardline military forces have levied at U.S. presence in the region, Navy Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi told semi-official Fars news agency that his forces have been building replicas of U.S. frigates and aircraft carriers for years in order to practice blowing them up.

For months, President Obama has been secretly telling the Israelis that his accord between six world powers and Iran would work out. Now Israel has broken with the agreement and are literally fending for themselves, unable to trust the president s plan. Netanyahu in fact is again making implied threats about a possible unilateral Israeli strike.

Pro-Israeli warmongers in Washington DC and elsewhere have abused the absence of democracy in Iran for their own belligerent purposes. But antiwar activists should not lose sight of the equally critical domestic scene. The diplomatic position of Iran when negotiating with the US and its allies would be infinitely more powerful if they could speak from a position of popular legitimacy. But in want of that legitimacy, the Islamic Republic remains a constitutionally flawed republic, ruled by a vast and deeply integrated mafia of wealth and power. Precisely for that reason, the history of the Islamic Republic is replete with social uprisings, from the Reformist Movement of the 1990s to the Green Movement of 2009, to the presidential election of 2013.