CNN (“In his first comments since truce, Iran’s supreme leader says country ‘crushed’ Israel“):
In his first comments since the Iran-Israel conflict ended in a ceasefire, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei congratulated “the great nation of Iran” for its “victory over the fake Zionist regime.”
“Despite all that noise, and with all those claims, the Zionist regime almost collapsed and was crushed under the blows of the Islamic Republic,” he was cited as saying by state-run IRNA news agency.
He said the United States entered the conflict with Israel “because they felt that if they did not enter, the Zionist regime would be destroyed.”
“However, the Americans did not gain anything in this war.”
A variant of the “declare victory and go home” approach, I guess. If this means the war is over, I suppose I’ll take it.
The degree to which both the US and Iranian leadership are making maximalist claims at odds with reality would be amusing if the stakes were lower.
