Operation Epic Fury vs. Operation Roaring Lion

The Qatari Elephant in the Room

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump meet at the White House on February 4, 2025. Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

On Saturday, February 28th, Israel and the United States began coordinated strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Trump calls the campaign Operation Epic Fury. Prime Minister Netanyahu calls it Operation Roaring Lion. Over the next 24 hours, the Ayatollah Khamenei was eliminated along with many other senior regime officials as well as several crucial Iranian military bases.

For the Iranian people, as an overwhelming majority of the population has expressed, this is a glorious time, and one they hope will end in complete victory over the Islamic Republic that has occupied Iran since the revolution in 1979.

It’s never easy to predict anything in the fog of war, but one abundantly clear thing is that the Iranian people have a chance of a new, freer society, one where women can have their hair out in public, do gymnastics, and wear normal clothes. The people of Iran have a chance, like times before, of living in a country where those accused of homosexuality aren’t hanged from cranes in public squares, and where Christians do not have to worship underground for fear of execution.

The Islamic Republic has had its foot on the people’s neck for almost 50 years. Beyond its borders, it has been one of the top sponsors of global terrorism and the top sponsor of terrorism in Africa. On behalf of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, and as a fellow believer in Yeshua, the destruction of the Iranian regime and the liberation of the persecuted church have been a prayer point for years.

While all of this is true, there are accompanying unfortunate truths that many of us are choosing to ignore.

The US is still very much in bed with Qatar.

IBSI has been tracking the very froward relationship between the second Trump administration and Qatar, which has been a complete 180-degree shift from the first Trump administration. In 2017, President Trump said very clearly that Qatar was a major sponsor of global terrorism and that it “must stop.” Today, not only have we not heard even echoes of Trump’s former stance, but anytime the president says anything about Qatar is to praise the Emir and other Qatari leaders.

The prevailing argument among Trump supporters is that he is simply playing 4D chess and has a master plan to dismantle and subdue Qatar. Evidence points to the opposite. The Washington Free Beacon reports that, from 2024 to 2025, Qatar tripled its funding of anti-Israel, anti-America, pro-jihad indoctrination on US college and university campuses. Yes. Qatari “investment” in American education went from $369 million to over $1.2 billion during Trump’s first year in office. What’s more, pro-Qatari pundits like Tucker Carlson, who peddle lies about “Christian persecution” in Israel, while running cover for actual Christian persecution in Qatar (where he recently bought a new house), continue to have direct and unfettered access to the White House.

Qatar is also one of the largest facilitators of the global slave trade. Qatar was one of the sponsors of the October 7 massacre in Israel. They are not, nor have they ever been, a true friend of the United States of America, or any of the free world.

So, how is allowing Qatar to deepen its Muslim Brotherhood fangs into American society 4D chess?

The same way that telling the Iranian people to go out and protest their government, and then doing nothing for almost two months, while at least 40,000 were slaughtered.

It isn’t 4D chess.

If President Trump’s strategy was to topple the Iranian regime, it makes absolutely no sense to have brought Operation Rising Lion to a screeching halt when Israel had the upper hand and was going to almost certainly finish the job last summer. It makes absolutely no sense that President Trump would then form a Board of Peace, placing hostile governments like Turkey, Qatar, and Pakistan in decision-making authority about issues like Israel’s border security with Syria and Gaza.

There is no amount of chess, 4D or otherwise, that explains how these actions are good for Israel or the US.

In fact, this would explain why Netanyahu has been publicly talking about removing Israel completely from US military aid, a relationship that anti-Israel talking heads love to misinterpret. (See Israel is Unhitching its Military from the US. Africa Should Do the Same)

The US does not give unfettered aid to Israel. It is a military contract. Israel can only spend the aid on US-made weapons, and only if the US approves. In situations like what happened after October 7th, 2023, the Biden administration slow-walked and sometimes outright denied Israel the weapons it needed to fight Hamas. Imagine a billionaire gave you a gift card for 10 million dollars, but the gift card could only be used in the billionaire’s shop. So essentially, all the money goes back to the billionaire. But even more so than that, you can only purchase items in the billionaire’s shop if he approves. In other words, he has the right to refuse any sales to you, and he tends to do it at times when you need what he has the most.

That has been the US’s aid relationship with Israel.

The US does, however, give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority (which gets funneled to Hamas), without any stipulations. No one seems to ever complain about our tax dollars going to that.

There are so many unanswered questions with the current Trump administration, but not because things are too complicated. It’s because not enough people have the courage to ask the questions. We can justify these very suspicious actions all we want, but we also need to remember that Trump will be President for less than three years, and the things he has set in motion now will continue to play out in the years to come.

There is a massive Qatari elephant in the room, and unlike an elephant, our memories are incredibly short-term.

This will be our undoing. It already is in many ways.

Again, we continue to pray for and stand with the people of Iran. May they have true freedom. May the Islamic Republic of Iran fall, never to rise again, and may new, better leadership take place and lead the new Persian society into a bastion of peace and security.