I'm frankly way too sleep deprived from air raid sirens at all hours of the day and night because Iran is firing ballistic missiles at densely populated civilian areas in several US allied Middle Eastern countries but after seeing post after post like this I feel like I have to say something as someone in the Middle East looking at the discourse in Europe and North America from afar. Those of us in countries like Bahrain, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman look at how the enlightened countries of the West are happy to enable the Iranian regime to spread death and destruction across the Middle East, caring only about whether they will have to pay more for oil. Who cares how many ballistic missiles armed with cluster munitions Iran lobs at densely populated civilian areas and international airports (leaving thousands stranded), as long as the price of gasoline doesn't go up. It kind of reminds me of bumper stickers from the 1973/4 oil shocks caused by a different Mid East War: "If you're cold this winter burn a Jew". I really right now don't care who the US president is when it comes to dealing with the Iran threat, if he's a progressive Democrat, if he's Trump, this should not be a partisan issue. The Iranian regime (distinct from the long suffering Iranian people) has been a major destabilising force in the Middle East and the world for decades now. It is a major sponsor of brutal jihadi groups like Hizballah with its horrific stranglehold on Lebanon, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen who've been terrorising international shipping in the Bab al Mandab straits and the Red Sea for years now, as well as inflicting terrible suffering on the people of Yemen. In recent months the IRGC and affiliated militias have murdered tens of thousands of Iranians who dared to protest against the tyranny of the regime. All over the world there are thousands, millions, or Iranians who fled this cruel regime and are begging Western countries to help them bring freedom, safety and stability to their homeland. Is this possible? I don't know, but their testimony of the horrors wrought by Khamenai's government show how One of its chief aims since the 1979 revolution has been the destruction of Israel, a country with which it does not even share a border and with whom Iran had warm relations prior to the revolution. As a Shii fundamentalist regime it has targetted its Sunni neighbours, stirring up terrorism, wars and instability across the Middle East, with massive death tolls, all sparked by the extreme ideology of the Iranian regime and the IRGC. Learning from Iraq's use of Scud missiles as terror weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian government has dedicated huge resources to the mass production of ballistic missiles and drones to terrorise the civilian populations of nearby Sunni countries and Israel in the present, but also to work on developing longer range missiles to threaten Europe and even the US in future. Iran has used its missile and drone expertise to help Russia in its war against Ukraine, building drone factories in Russia and helping to kill and maim vast numbers of Ukrainian civilians and decimate Ukrainian towns and cities. And then there is the Iranian regimes nuclear weapons programme. This isn't WMDs in Iraq all over again, this is a real and present danger, not just to Israel, which I understand many in the west would be happy to see nuked along with her 10 million citizens, what the Iranian leadership likes to call a "one bomb country", because Israel is so small, just a couple of nuclear warheads could wipe out its entire population, but because a nuclear Iran could more easily hold the world to ransom - imagine a crisis over oil tankers getting through the Straits of Hormuz if Iran already had viable nuclear warheads to fix to its long range missiles aimed throughout the Middle East, at Europe, at southern Asia. The Iranian government's single minded focus on all of these projects have made it a real time threat not just to its neighbours, not just to Israel, but to the world at large, yes, to you in the West, in North America, in Europe, in Australia, NZ, Japan, Korea - wealthy industrial nations who worry about the price of oil and the impact on their economies. Yes, you can all keep appeasing Iran, let them wreak havoc across the Mid East as long as you get your oil, but the wars and instability will catch up to you and your economies because like it or not, you all have important economic interests in the Middle East, whether it's Gulf oil and gas or Israeli innovation and R&D. From medical technology to agricultural innovation to computer chips to cyber security, Israel is an important part of the global economy contributing to the world in a myriad ways that improve standards of living, promote growth and create jobs, including in the US and Europe. Western countries have an interest in Israel not being wiped off the map by Iran. It is detrimental to the global economy when Iran threatens international oil and gas supplies but it is also detrimental to the global economy when one of the world's top technological innovators, major R&D centres and huge start up generators is under fire from ballistic missiles. Likewise when a major banking centre like Manama, Bahrain is being targetted or a business hub like Abu Dhabi.