The Hamas paragliders, who were tentacles of Iran, began today’s war on Oct. 7, 2023, igniting one of history’s most spectacular backfires. Iran’s regime and its terrorism multipliers, Hamas and Hezbollah, have unintentionally magnified Israel’s security. And Iran’s regime, whose mantra since its inception in 1979 has been “Death to America,” is near death by the clasped hands of Israel and America.
The wielders of Iran’s regime, which is founded on fear, surely experienced a sudden, terrifying epiphany when the aerial attacks, unlike previous ones, began in daylight: The attackers knew when and where the regime’s senior officials would be meeting in Tehran that day. Precision munitions, directed by spectacular intelligence, enabled a decapitation strategy.
The at least 30,000 protesters who perished in Iran’s streets in early January did not die in vain. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution failed to topple a tyranny, but refuted the then-common pessimism that tyrants can assure their permanence by controlling the consciousness of their publics. (George Orwell in “1984”: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”) Iran’s protesters dramatically underscored the regime’s barbarism, so those who today regret the regime’s demise reveal their barbarism.
Some say that U.S. involvement in Iran constitutes a “war of choice.” That too casually bandied phrase rarely fits untidy reality. America’s Civil War was a choice: Lincoln chose not to heed those — they were not few — who agreed with the prominent publisher Horace Greeley. He said of the seceding Southern states, “Let the erring sisters go in peace.” Lincoln chose against such national suicide. Donald Trump’s administration has chosen not to wager U.S. safety on Iran’s abandoning its multi-decade pursuit of nuclear weapons, or on Iran’s acquiring them but not really meaning “Death to America.”
For Israel, the death of Iran’s self-proclaimed genocidal regime was a choice only in the sense that Israel chose to believe the regime when it called Israel a “one-bomb country.” Tyrants lie promiscuously, but occasionally are candid. In 1939, Adolf Hitler said a world war would mean “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Israel exists because Hitler meant that. Israel’s survival depends on forever thinking that nothing is unthinkable.
The U.S. action for regime change in Iran is not sufficient to produce regional tranquility. It is, however, a necessity for beginning to reestablish a precondition for a more peaceable world: the credibility of U.S. deterrence.
A nadir of post-1945 U.S. power — and its precondition, confidence — was the 1975 departure of the last helicopter from the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon. A second low point was reached when Barack Obama drew, in 2012, and then ignored a red line (concerning Syrian chemical weapons). A third was in 2021 when Joe Biden produced a chaotic exit from Afghanistan.
Today, Vladimir Putin is watching Venezuela, Iran (a source of some of Putin’s drones) and soon, perhaps, Cuba, join Syria as vanished clients. The swiftness of their downfall illustrates the hollowness of Russia’s claim to be a formidable global actor.
Today’s world, where the velocity of information and the capability of weaponry annihilate distances and compress time, resembles an Alexander Calder mobile: a disturbance here translates into disturbance over there. In one of history’s stranger caroms, Oct. 7 led to regime change at Harvard and other universities, and forced a U.S. reckoning with antisemitism’s infection of both extremities of the political spectrum.
Unlike in Venezuela, mere decapitation — regime modification — is insufficient for Iran. The ayatollahs’ regime loathed not just modernity, which America exemplifies, but humanity, whose dignity is in imagining betterment through reason banishing superstition.
Let there be no more incomprehension akin to Obama’s first inaugural, in which he said, with Iran likely in mind, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Or George H.W. Bush’s inaugural, in which he said to belligerent nations, “Good will begets good will.”
Iran’s potential for flourishing is in what is ancient and what is young. It can draw on more than 20 centuries of cultural identity that preceded the recent decades of theocratic primitivism. And the median age of Iranians is about 34. This guarantees the restless energy that freedom requires.
Nationalism, so often derided, was never captured by Iran’s regime. Instead, nationalism simmered against the state, which warred unceasingly against the nation. As America prepares to help, from a distance, Iran’s political rebirth, we should heed an American poet’s advice of bold thoroughness. Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.”
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