The late Shah of Iran was forced into exile by the Islamic Revolution on Jan. 16, 1979. On Feb. 1, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran from his exile in France and proceeded — as Lenin did when the Kaiser’s Germany injected him “in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus … into Russia,” to quote Churchill — to impose a medieval fanaticism on a prospering part of the West, a country of enormous natural wealth and a highly educated people. Within weeks, crowds of millions were chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” A stunned and incompetent President Jimmy Carter and his team did not know what they had allowed to happen.
Former President Richard Nixon did. I was on his very small staff in San Clemente as he went about writing his first of many best-sellers, The Real War. The former president, his chief writer Ray Price, and I would take breaks from our tasks to watch the daily madness from Tehran in those months. Nixon was clear-eyed: This was a disaster for the West. One of the three pillars of the Middle East, the others being Israel and Saudi Arabia, had fallen into chaos and the iron grip of a fanatic unlike any the modern world had dealt with since Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong and Soviet Union Prime Minister Joseph Stalin at their worst.
Darkness descended on Iran and the great Persian people, and history was submerged under extremist Shia rule. First Khomeini and then his successor, the “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have always been the only people who mattered in the dictatorship that evolved from the revolution. Since then, Iranian agents have kidnapped, killed, and wounded thousands of Americans, assassinated hundreds of expatriate Iranians, and spread terror around the world even as the country built terrorist proxy armies around Israel.
One of those proxies made a strategic blunder. Hamas leader Yayha Sinwar planned, organized, and launched the Oct. 7 invasion into Israel and the horrific massacre that followed. With 1,200 dead, 5,000 wounded, and hundreds kidnapped, Israel and the world had to confront the reality that Iran and its proxies had no other goal as great as the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. If Khamenei obtained nuclear weapons, he would use them to destroy Israel. Oct. 7 was tragic and appalling, but it was also all that any sane person needed to see to be persuaded that Iran could never have nukes.
President Donald Trump, like every president before him, declared this. But Trump meant it. In every interview, Trump said the same thing again and again. On May 7, the president laid it out to me on my program. “It’s very simple,” he said. “Yeah, it’s very simple.”
“There are only two alternatives there — blow [the nuclear facilities] up nicely, or blow them viciously.”
Trump disables the ability of many otherwise rational and calm people to think clearly. As a result, they don’t pay attention to his spoken words. When he repeats and repeats and repeats the same thing, take it to the bank.
Trump has Khamenei’s measure and was never going to fall for the fabled Iranian bait-and-switch that sucked in former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and their very credentialed teams. Prime Minister Netanyahu has never for a minute of his 30 years in the first rank of Israeli leadership believed that Iran could never develop nukes or that the fanatics at the top of that evil regime would hesitate to use them. The tragedy of Oct. 7 persuaded any serious person of this truth.
So Trump and Netanyahu have worked, since the former’s reelection, toward this week — and perhaps this month or many months. Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs will be crushed.
And every serious person in the West will cheer the courage of both men and the men and women of their armed forces who are making it so.
YES, IRAN WAS ON THE VERGE OF OBTAINING NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Iran began this war with its direct assaults on Israel in April and October of last year, which were the inevitable consequences of the Oct. 7 invasion of Israel by Iran’s proxy force in Gaza and the Oct. 8 decision by Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon to join in the killing of Jews.
This awful war is reaching its crescendo, and Trump and Netanyahu are in control of the West’s strongest and most ingenious militaries. It will not end well for the fanatics in Tehran, but it may result in a long-awaited counter-Revolution in Iran that would free the great Persian people to return to modernity and the West.
Hugh Hewitt is a longtime conservative commentator and author. He hosts the Hugh Hewitt Show on Salem Radio every weekday from 3–6 p.m.