The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group arrived in the Middle East on Monday in what is widely suspected to be a precursor to another American attack on Iran.
Another sign in this vein comes from the Civil Aviation Authority in Israel, whose head, Shmuel Zakai, warned international airlines last week that the region may be going into “a more sensitive period,” according to reports. In his letter, Zakai says that “the security situation remains ‘dynamic,’ and stresses that Israel could again move to close its airspace if necessary — as it did in the Iranian conflicts of April and October 2024 and in June 2025.”
That may explain why a slew of airlines canceled flights to the region over the weekend. Israeli media reported that “several major airlines, including Lufthansa, Air France, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and Swiss have canceled their Saturday flights to Middle East destinations including Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, according to flight information published on airport websites, amid fears of a conflict involving Iran.” Air France canceled flights to Tel Aviv and Dubai. British Airways suspended flights to Dubai. And KLM halted flights to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Any U.S. attack on Iran will likely be accompanied by Israeli military action.
More Firepower to Come
The Abraham Lincoln carries F-35C and F/A-18 jet fighters and has EA-18G Growler electronic-warfare planes designed to jam enemy defenses. A defense official told The Wall Street Journal it arrived in the Middle East accompanied by three Navy destroyers that can fire long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
But there’s more firepower converging on the region. Per the Journal:
The U.S. has deployed F-15E jet fighters to a base in Jordan, and it is also moving Patriot and Thaad air defenses into the region to help defend American installations and U.S. partners from Iranian counterattacks, according to flight-tracking data and two U.S. officials. Some of the equipment has already moved, and more is expected to be in place in one to two weeks, one of the officials said.
Command Central announced the carrier’s arrival on social media.
President Donald Trump acknowledged last week that a “big force” was heading toward Iran. “I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely,” he continued. The president has already been briefed on options for a strike.
When the Iranian demonstrations were raging, Trump made comments suggesting he would strike the country over reports that the authorities were killing protesters. But then he dialed back the aggressive rhetoric, saying that was no longer occurring.
But there was likely more to Trump’s hesitance. Arab allies including Qatar and Saudi Arabia have pleaded with him not to attack Iran because it would cause economic and social instability. (The only nation in the region that wants the United States to hit Iran is Israel.) Trump had also received counsel at the time that attacking Iran might result in blowback to U.S. airbases and nearby allies that it wasn’t ready to guard against. Perhaps all this new firepower in the region is intended to minimize the blowback after an attack.
Foreign Interference
It’s an open secret that America and Israel are fomenting regime change in Iran. Officials from both governments have expressed support for the protesters in Iran. Moreover, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo said on social media that Mossad agents were among the demonstrators.
Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who lives in Iran, told Judge Andrew Napolitano that although some citizens are legitimately disillusioned with the economic situation there, the protests didn’t become violent until foreign agents interfered on the ground. The demonstrations were peaceful at first, he said,
but then we had the infiltrations of these rioters, and they started increasingly becoming violent and destroying property. But on Thursday night, it became really bad. There was a lot of fighting, a lot of killing, the rioters killed a lot of people. … We didn’t have violence the first two days — no arrests. And then we have indication, clear indication, that there was foreign interference. There’s Mike Pompeo’s tweet. There is the Persian message by Mossad to Iranians that they are on the ground. And also … Channel 14 of Israel — they said that foreign states, meaning Israel and probably the United States, are funneling in weapons.
Marandi also corroborated the Iranians’ allegations that protesters have been shot by people within the crowds. The reason he believes that, he said, is because of information he received from an acquaintance who works in a hospital and worked on protesters who had been shot.
Another point Marandi made is that support for the current theocratic regime in Iran is significant. “We had huge rallies across the country against the rioters and in support of the state and the Constitution and the leader,” he said, adding that there were up to three million supporters in Tehran. According to him, the brutality of the rioters convinced many Iranians to support the current regime. “The reality on the ground is that, what the Israelis, the Mossad, the CIA, and others have done is, they have united people again together just like they did during the 12-Day War.”
Marandi said the riots died down once Iranian officials turned off the internet because that crippled communications between foreign agents and the people they were coordinating with. This is something former CIA analyst Larry Johnson told TNA in an interview we published last week.
Johnson believes the unrest in Iran was largely a “covert action planned by the CIA with Mossad and MI6.” But their plot began to fail on January 8, he said:
What happened was the intelligence assets had placed Starlink terminals throughout Iran. And they were using [these] to communicate with and direct actions on the ground in a variety of cities. The Iranians, with the assistance of Russia and China and their electronic warfare capabilities, were able to ferret out those terminals, turn them off — they shut down the internet — and prevent their communication. Once that communication died, these foreign-controlled assets were no longer going out into the street to protest.
True Agenda: Regime Change
Whatever the genuine degree of disillusionment in Iran — and there certainly are legitimate grievances among the people — it looks like the U.S. will probably take war action again. Some analysts warned this would happen again just weeks after America’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites in the summer. The true agenda for Israel and America is regime change — and it looks like nothing short of that will do.
In response to the American Armada moving into the region, the Iranians are shaking their fists in defiance. In Tehran, officials unveiled a giant billboard intended to serve as a warning. Al Jazeera reports:
The image showed a bird’s-eye view of an aircraft carrier with destroyed fighter jets on the deck and blood running in the water to form the US flag. “If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind,” read an accompanying message in Farsi and English.
Furthermore:
The Iranian establishment’s remaining allies in the so-called “axis of resistance”, who took no action during June’s war, have also signalled that they may this time attack US and Israeli interests if conflict breaks out. Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, the chief of the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, issued a fiery statement on Monday warning of “total war” in case of US aggression.
If the United States and Israel pull off regime change in Iran, this would be the second time Americans were involved in overthrowing an Iranian government. The last time was in 1979 — and that intervention led to the current regime.
