On Wednesday, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened the sovereignty of the tiny oil-rich Gulf state Bahrain, belittling it as “an Iranian province.”
Bahrain is not the only Arab state to be threatened by the Mullahs. Indeed, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran-Arab relations have been tense. Iran has armed, trained, and financed Hezbollah in Lebanon, to undermine Beirut’s pro-Western government. In 1987, Iranians incited a riot at a pilgrimage in Mecca, calling for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. Iran has also played a primary role in destabilizing Iraq and has been linked with supplying weapons to kill Americans.
Leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps political bureau Yadallah Javani boasted, “America’s power in the region is fading… Iran’s power is growing… so that everyone sees it as the leading power in the Middle East.” To this end, Peter Brookes, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, notes that Iran seeks nuclear weapons to further threaten and subjugate its Sunni Arab neighbors.