Let me concede it right at the start. We do apply a double standard to Israel. No Western country imposes sanctions on the Jewish state over its illegal nuclear weapons program. No one has suggested that we bomb its facilities or assassinate its technicians.
The reason for our double standard should be obvious. Israel is not pointing its nuclear weapons at us. It offers no threat to Europe or the United States. Whatever you think of its government, that government is not seeking to overthrow yours — unless, of course, you are Iranian.
Iran, on the other hand, has been a destabilizing force in international affairs ever since the 1979 revolution. Think back to the ayatollahs’ overture, their way of introducing themselves to the world. They held 66 U.S. Embassy personnel in Tehran as hostages.
The passage of time means we are no longer as shocked as we should be by that event and what it signaled. Diplomatic immunity is one of the oldest and most widely observed of principles. Even during World War II, when regimes bent on one another’s destruction sent bombs against cities, embassy staff were peacefully evacuated through neutral states.
In violating the sanctity of a legation, the mullahs were telling the world that they did not follow its rules. Territorial jurisdiction, national sovereignty, and diplomatic immunity — all were meaningless concepts to be swept away, along with their authors, in anticipation of the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam.
The ayatollahs had started as they meant to go on, sponsoring terrorist militias, not only in Iraq and Syria, not only in Yemen and Lebanon, but further — in the old khanates of Central Asia, in the rugged hills of the Balkans. Iranian security personnel were implicated in terrorist attacks as far afield as London and Buenos Aires. Why Buenos Aires? Simply because they could.
When we think of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, we tend to emphasize the first word over the second. But the mullahs behaved like every other revolutionary regime, seeking to replicate their system abroad. As French Jacobins did after 1789, and Soviet Communists after 1917, they inspired and sponsored imitators around the world. Like those earlier revolutionaries, they found that, by putting the full resources of a state behind what had previously been a fringe ideology (political Islamism was as marginal before 1979 as Bolshevism before 1917), they turned it into a global force.
In those earlier cases, international coalitions eventually replaced the revolutionaries with regimes that respected the comity of nations. In France, foreign armies invaded the country to restore the monarchy. In the USSR, the Cold War was eventually won by superior capitalist economics.
With Iran, we alternated half-heartedly between the stick of sanctions and the carrot of offering to lift them if the mullahs renounced their nuclear ambitions. Neither approach worked. So Israel, which had recent experience of Iranian missiles being lobbed at its cities, and which could not risk a regime that openly aimed to extirpate it acquiring the means to do so, acted.
A lot of people dislike Israel, and their dislike blinds them to the nature of the Iranian regime. In much the same way, some leftists who detested the West supported the ayatollahs in their early days. Michel Foucault was an early cheerleader. So, rather ironically, given the way they went on to hunt him down, was Salman Rushdie.
Still, if it helps dislodge the ayatollahs, Israel will be doing the world a favor. Their regime is inherently destabilizing. In Leninist terms, it exports its internal contradictions. Or, to borrow a metaphor from chaos theory, it drinks order from its environment. Getting rid of it would be the most positive geopolitical development since the fall of the USSR in 1991.
We won the Cold War by making clear that our quarrel was with Soviet communism, not with individual Poles or Lithuanians or, indeed, Russians. Iran is arguably the only civilization that rivals Israel in its antiquity and continuity and could be a benign force in world affairs. But not while it is run by men who believe that they are hastening the end of days.
Who might take over from the ayatollahs is not clear. All manner of opposition groups claim to speak for the majority — monarchists, Marxists, and everyone in between. And that is before we come to the ethnic minorities (mainly Azeris and Kurds), the Sunnis, or, indeed, the protesting students.
But ask yourself how any successor regime could be worse than this one, a regime bent on global war and close to getting the Bomb. And then thank the Israelis.