https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21379/iran-fear-and-braggadocio
In a year or so, Khamenei has tried to repackage those setbacks as great victories for his now defunct “Axis of Resistance.” His assumption was that if the worst came to the worst, he would play his joker: signaling readiness to revive the defunct Obama “nuclear deal” with a shaky Biden administration keen on securing any deal with Tehran to justify Kumbala’s “greatest diplomatic achievement.”
Here is the ayatollah’s latest masterpiece:
Iranian “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s great masterpiece.
After weeks of speculation about “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei’s strategy for dealing with the new Trump administration in Washington, it seems that he has opted for a cocktail of tantalizing pledges and boastful threats. Tehran circles sum the posture up with a simple formula advanced by Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi: We don’t want war but are ready for it!
The signal that the Supreme Guide has decided to authorize new talks about his nuclear project but is also preparing for a putative war with the US or Israel came with a poem he put in circulation last week.
Khamenei has been writing or, as his unkind critics suggest, committing poetry since he was in his teens in the 1950s. But he has always been reluctant to offer his oeuvre to the public, refusing to publish a diwan as even the greenest saplings in the garden do.
Thus, those who follow his poetic career know that he publishes a poem only when a major challenge faces him or the regime he inherited from another poet, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The latest poem is a sonnet (ghazal in Persian and Arabic) of 14 rhyming hemistiches or seven lines (be it in Persian and Arabic) and is supposed to depict the poet’s inner struggle with rising fears and persistent doubts.
The message it wishes to pass is one of steadfastness regardless of the Islamic Republic’s recent setbacks in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and parts of Yemen held by Houthis.