To put into perspective the scale of the Iranian regime’s massacre this month of its own people, it’s worth recalling that over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were murdered in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, while just under 3,000 people perished in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American military history, claimed some 3,600 lives, Union and Confederate alike.
So far, a U.S.-based Iranian human rights group says it has verified the killing of more than 5,500 protesters and is still reviewing 17,000 additional cases. Many thousands more were injured, and independent reports indicate that tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested or arbitrarily detained. An Iranian doctor in the city of Isfahan told The Times that they had seen “young people whose brains were smashed with live bullets, and a mom who was shot in the neck, her two small children were crying in the car, a child whose bladder, hip and rectum was crushed with a bullet.”
That’s just one eyewitness report among many. Meanwhile, the head of Iran’s judiciary promises punishment “without the slightest leniency.” His name is Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Will the world let him get his way?
That’s the question that, at this writing, confronts the Trump administration. Not the United Nations Security Council, where Iran can rely on diplomatic cover from its close friends in Moscow and Beijing. Not the European Union, which has condemned and sanctioned Iran, but lacks any additional means to punish it. Not Arab leaders, who would prefer a weakened Iran that brutalizes its own people to a broken Iran that exports instability — or a liberated Iran that inspires emulation.
And not the campus activists and global do-gooders who care so deeply about Palestinian lives but not about Iranian ones.
So it’s left to the United States to impose meaningful consequences on the Iranian regime for one of the worst atrocities of this century. Donald Trump told Axios Monday that the Iranians “want to make a deal” that would forestall a military strike. Yet Tehran shows no sign so far of agreeing to America’s core demands that it ban all independent uranium enrichment, end its support for Hezbollah and other proxies, and put caps on its long-range missile program.
Iran could always become more pliant, if only to play for time. But the odds are growing that the president will order some sort of attack once sufficient U.S. forces are in the region, which could happen as early as this week. That, in turn, makes it more likely that Israel will become involved — either because it will respond to Iranian retaliatory missile strikes or because it will seek to pre-empt them by hitting first. Whichever way, this will not be a Venezuela-style sub-three-hour war.
Is the military option wise? The argument against it is that it’s unlikely to achieve much.
Iran’s traumatized protesters might have been energized by a U.S. attack when they were still in the street; they would probably be unwilling to risk their necks again. The regime has surely learned the lesson of Israel’s successful strikes last June against its top commanders and is hiding its leaders much more effectively. Last year’s Israeli strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile sites did not keep Iran from restarting production lines once the war had ended. And a U.S. attack, even one that carefully spares civilians, will also reinforce the regime’s propaganda about perfidious Uncle Sam.
Weighed against all this is a different set of risks: of the example of a U.S. president who urged protesters to go in the streets and said help was on the way only to betray them through inaction; of missing the opportunity to cripple an enemy when it is vulnerable, uncertain and — despite its show of force — internally divided; of giving it time to recover its strength, knowing that when it does it will again pose a clear and present danger to the United States and our allies.
And something else: Do we really want to live in a world in which people like Mohseni-Ejei, the judicial leader, can terrorize people with utter impunity? Have decades of vowing “Never again” — this Tuesday marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — taught us nothing more than to offer pro forma condemnations when thousands of protesters are gunned down by modern-day Einsatzgruppen?
I know that, for now, thoughtful Americans are much more alarmed by the thuggish killing in Minneapolis on Saturday of Alex Pretti and by the smears to which he’s been posthumously subjected by senior members of the administration. I also know that the president who is so grotesquely at fault for inflaming the situation in Minnesota makes an unlikely champion of protesters in Iran.
But if Pretti’s death is a tragedy, what do we say or do in the face of the murder of thousands of Iranians? Are they, as Stalin might have said, just another statistic?
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Should Iran’s Executioners Go Unpunished? appeared first on New York Times.
