Why Iran has come out on top after nearly 41 years of confrontation with the zionist-American empire - a general overview of strategic achievements and setbacks on both sides
I find nothing much to add to this presentation. A commented summary for non-Persian speakers:
Dana is completely right here about Iran's considerable achievements against the empire.
Iran's first achievement has certainly been the setting up of a network of highly capable, ideologically committed, socially rooted and extremely resilient allied forces accross the region, solidly organized by Iran into an Axis of Resistance. Starting with Lebanon's Hezbollah in the early 1980's, followed by the Iraqi PMU, which constitute these two countries' preeminent political-military nexuses. This is not just a military, religious-ideological and political corridor but increasingly also an economic one. It represents an unprecedented phenomenon in the past several centuries of Iranian history. With Yemen's Ansarallah, yet another movement was added to the alliance in a more remote area of the region.
The zionist regime's defeat in the 2006 war on Lebanon and the expelling of zionist occupation forces from southern Lebanon in the early 2000's by Iran's ally Hezbollah are historic events representing the first instances of Arab victory against the regime occupying Palestine.
Other success against the empire: the way in which Iran succeeded in repelling direct and indirect aggression by some 80 countries (including the US and its western NATO allies) against Syria, with the aim of toppling president Assad and thereby undermining the Resistance Axis.
A fourth major success for Iran was the defeat of ISIS, which was yet to complete the role assigned to it by its conceptors - in fact, ISIS was supposed to capture Baghdad, to redraw the borders of the region's nation-states according to the project for a "New Middle East" pursued by the enemy ever since the neocon administration of Bush jr., and to provoke a spill over of instability into Iran. The ISIS abomination was intended by its zio-American sponsors to last around two decades, but martyr Soleimani and the Defenders of the Shrines cut it short to only six years and by doing so, totally spoiled the enemy's plans.
The list goes on with more recent series of operations such as the Ayn al-Assad attack, the downing of the US RQ-9 UAV or the strike on the Aramco facility at Abqaiq, where Iran masterfully alternated between overt action and activation of allied forces. In the latter case, the enemy despite its massive means of surveillance failed to properly detect where the missiles even came from. Equally significant is the fact that the RQ-9 was hit by a domestically developed and produced Iranian SAM system.
Despite the presence in Iran of agents of influence and spies, it was shown that in the most sensitive sectors, infiltrators are having the least impact. Hence the successful launch of a satellite by Sepah not long ago, which also highlights the technological levels reached by Iran.
Iran's resilience is one of the causes for the progressive reduction and withdrawal of US troops from the region, be it Afghanistan or Iraq, while Iran's local allies for their part have maintained and expanded their influence.
Likewise the shelling of zionist positions in the occupied Golan Heights by Resistance forces, which took place on a couple of occasions, marks a first since 1967 and exemplifies the ongoing encirclement of the zionist entity by Iran, that Tel Aviv is unable to prevent.
Iran has also had significant success in its fight against terrorist groups threatening its security. Successive blows dealt to the MKO (from the Rezvan ballistic missile strikes prior to the US invasion of Iraq, to the raid on Camp Ashraf which left American occupiers utterly helpless), to PJAK (fully expelled from Iranian territory in the aftermath of two comprehensive military operations) and other pan-Kurdish separatist armed goups (more recently struck by precision guided ballistic missiles in northern Iraq), to so-called Al-Ahvaz separatists (leading figure trapped in Turkey and transferred to Iran), to the monarchist Tondar (leader trapped in the UAE and transferred to Iran), to the so-called Jundollah takfiri group formerly operating in Sistan-Baluchestan (forced landing of the airliner carrying their leader Abdolmalek Rigi), etc.
Likewise, Dana is spot on about the empire's achievements.
First, he is right to stress that the terrorist assassinations against Iranian and allied figures are no real gains for the enemy, because all those martyred in this way have been and are effectively replaced, and the Resistance has never been truly weakened by these desperate acts. On the contrary, it kept growing more powerful and capable. For instance, after the zionist regime martyred Hezbollah's first Secretary General Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, the latter was replaced by Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah and this did not impede the rise of the Lebanese Resistance in any way. Same thing when it comes to the martyrdom of prominent Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh.
Second, other than the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner (and possibly having had a hand in the shotdown of the Ukrainian plane), essentially boil down to two things. One, the enemy so far has imposed itself in the propaganda / soft war / psy-ops department. Two, it has scored an important point by managing to establish a domestic, traitorous fifth-column in Iran, which is working in its interests and trying to neutralize from within the progress made by the revolutionary core of the IR against Iran's enemies.
But as Dana says, when comparing achievements, Iran has been the victorious party hands down. Zio-American imperialists definitely sought not only to prevent Iran from rising in any shape or form, but actually to destroy Iran. However, they undoubtedly failed in this sinister effort.
In fact, this is recommended viewing for our Iranian friends who keep giving in to desperation, hopelesness, negativity, and who have a habit of making gloomy defeatist predictions about the future.
I am reminded of some Iranians and even foreign supporters of Iran, who at the height of the Syrian war and particularly before the battle of Aleppo, were spending their entire time lamenting and painting one apocalyptic scenario after the other. And then Iran largely managed to defeat its enemies in Syria, the zionist-NATO-PGCC-Turkish axis completely failed to achieve their stated goals of "regime change" in Damascus and disruption of the Resistance Axis.
To me, this offers a perfect illustration of the conclusions reached by Dana in the above video. On the ground, Iran has the upper hand. However this reality is yet to be sufficiently reflected by the mood that seems to reign among certain segments of the Iranian public, including among those who are not siding with the enemy. And this is precisely due to the enemy's relative success in the field of psychological operations and information warfare: even some patriotic Iranians are not spared from the effects of the omnipresent propagandistic bombardment which takes aim at the Islamic Republic's legitimacy, portrays the latter as incompetent and weak while putting on a pedestal Iran's rivals and enemies, and gratuitiously paints a bleak future for Iran. And so it is that patriotic Iranians can sometimes lose sight of the overall geostrategic picture, which happens to be favorable to Iran, while a minority among their compatriots will even side with the existential enemy out of mere spite for the Islamic Republic.
But at the end of the day, these mind games are not going to alter the geopolitical balance, nor undermine Islamic Iran's admirable and exemplary achievements against its powerful enemies.
