Alastair Crooke: The Iran War & The ‘Terrible Power Of The Purse’

Authored by Alastair Crooke

The “Grand Design” to “maintain [western civilization’s] place at the head of the world” (as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it) requires the tools for ensuring compliance are two-fold: The creating of destructive revolutionary fervor from below (now termed “regime change”); and secondly, the use of what Theodore Herzl in a now famous phrase termed “the terrible power of the purse to exert irresistible pressure on international politics” in order to co-opt the ruling strata into a power network that would advance the Grand Design “project.”

This is what we are observing with Trump’s war on Iran. The June 2025 Israeli-American attack was primarily a decapitation attack designed to disable both Iran’s political and military leadership, whilst armed Mossad trained elements, the MEK and Baluchi separatists inter alia would be inserted into Iran to foment revolution from the street below. At that time, the former Shah’s son – implausibly – was being presented to the western media as the incoming leader of Iran.

It did not work. And now Netanyahu is touting that Israel has “fresh evidence” that Iran is moving towards producing a weapon component to its nuclear program. He is telling Trump that he needs now to finish the job of destroying Iran. And to motivate Trump further, leading Israeli daily Ma’ariv reports that Israel stove-piped Likud polling directly into the White House to the effect that Netanyahu might win the Israeli elections on October 27. According to the report, this Likud information (that runs counter to most other Israeli polls) prompted Trump’s full-hearted election endorsement of Netanyahu.

At the same time, the pro-Zionist billionaire donors are wielding the “terrible power of the purse” at Trump: We will not accept anything less than the defeat of Iran. If you continue to seek a deal we will pull our financial support from you.

Senior current and former security officials in Israel however, refute the need for an imminent attack on Iran and Netanyahu’s claim of new evidence of Iran moving toward a nuclear weapon –

IDF Chief of Staff Zamir told Israel’s Channel 13: “We don’t see a need to attack Iran before the elections.”

Leading Israeli military strategist Udi Evental has cautioned:

A war to thwart the elections and democracy, not to thwart Iran’s nuclear programme. Netanyahu, who is suspected of being up to his neck in extraneous political and personal considerations, is unfit to make such a decision. He must not be allowed to.

Whether or not there is such evidence really does not matter. Likely it doesn’t exist. The claim simply forms the peg on which the US is being told to take action to “finish the job” on Iran.

As ever, Netanyahu said in the last days:

Iran is once again trying to develop its weapons of death … There is only one way to remove this threat once and for all – to topple the regime in Iran, and that is my directive to the IDF, the Mossad and the security agencies.

A senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Tehran’s current internal intelligence assessment indicates a high likelihood that large-scale bombing may begin – even before Tuesday’s Israeli elections.

The point here is that Iran does not care who wins in the midterms, nor who will win the U.S. Presidency in 2028. For the Iranian leadership it is all the same. They well understand the concept of the “Grand Design” (how could they not?).

It is well understood in Iran that they are engaged in a long war confronting the entire Atlanticist bloc – Israel, its intelligence services, its arsenals, its satellites, its military industry, and its media machine. It does not matter whether it is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. Senior Iranian officials see both parties to have been bought by the Zionist terrible power of the purse.

Understanding the “Design” is to understand that the Zionist donor class will never be satisfied by some “deal or trade-off.” They claim it to be certain that Iran ultimately would renege on any mooted acquiescence to U.S. demands. Israelis and their donor class auxiliaries simply do not believe (and repeat incessantly) that Iran would ever accept compliance to Israel, or to accept US political and cultural dominance.

They may be right. Why?

Simply because Iran has a deep civilization, stretching back to a specifically Persian-Iranian complex of beliefs and practices of the second millennium BCE – Mazdaism, a cosmology of divine drama, represented by the continuing struggle between Light and Darkness.

The renown scholar, Professor Henri Corbin, has argued that “Iran was situated at a center… it being not only a nation or an empire, but a spiritual universe.” He understood Iran therefore, as a mediating force, both geographically and metaphysically.

For millenia, Iranians have experienced the world as having a clear metaphysical dimension – and history. It is therefore unlikely that they would be attracted to a western nihilistic material posture. Civilizational states, whether Iran or Russia, that embrace contrarian values would never succumb to the “Grand Design.” Hence, they must be destroyed.

What does this metaphysical history mean? It means that Iran is preparing for war, not for a “deal.” Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and personal representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, stated that,

If the question is whether Iran still has the ability to continue missile and drone operations [in the event of an attack], the answer is ‘yes’ … The United States has valuable assets in the region. In the event of war, cables, data centres and artificial intelligence facilities could also come within range. If the conflict begins again, we will have a broader plan.

Everyone must understand that action against Iran carries a cost.

Senior Iranian officials believe that war is coming. Iran has extensive plans (in the event of an attack) that encompasses Saudi Arabia and its leadership, too, a senior Iranian hinted. Karl Miller (from the field) states that in this respect, already a quarter of Saudi oil production has been destroyed and that the damage as a result of AnsarAllah’s retaliatory attacks runs through the whole Saudi production chain – “from wellhead to the gas station” – and that Saudi Arabia has been covering the gap by draining their tanks.

Miller’s report, quoted by Larry Johnson, warns that,

if Saudi Arabia’s export outlets close, its oil has nowhere to go but to its own refineries, its own power plants and its storage tanks. Once the storage is full, that is roughly the ceiling on what Saudi Arabia could keep producing. Close Ras Tanura and Yanbu at the same time, and the Kingdom would have to shut in most of its oil fields. That is exactly the scenario Ansar Allah’s campaign against the pipeline, the Red Sea and the Gulf terminals, is built to produce.

“Any new American or Israeli campaign against Iran will land on a Saudi energy system that has no slack left to absorb it,” Larry Johnson observes.

Any new attack on Iran, by extension, will mean the end to the Gulf as we know it, an end to the petrodollar, and an end to the Gulf as the primary supplier of hard cash to Wall Street and the Tech world.

Nonetheless, Trump reportedly has said that the U.S. is not currently negotiating with Iran, and something will happen “fairly soon.” Maybe. (But with Trump everything distils into speculation). But if he is bluffing, it won’t work, and his humiliation will be all the deeper.

One man who knows Trump better than most (having authored four books on him), Michael Wolff, opines that if the Democrats win in the 3 November midterms –

They will be trying to impress upon the world that it is ‘a new day.’ Trump, for his part, will be trying to impress upon the world that he still controls the stage. There will be a series of these kinds of things (such as a putative invasion of Cuba, for example) greater than anything we may have imagined. He will not be humbled. The idea of humility does not exist in Donald Trump’s soul. Therefore he will do – the opposite.

He concluded, “Not retreat but attack.”