Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the so-called supreme leader of Iran, is dead. So too are at least 40 senior Iranian regime officials, all of whom were killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic. It was a deserved and nearly inevitable end to a regime that created the greatest terrorist state on the planet. It should be stated as plain fact that only the United States, the indispensable nation, could have brought this about. Thus, the regime was bound ultimately to be destroyed, and no nation or its own people could make that happen without America’s participation.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was born in bloodshed in 1979, nearly half a century ago. From its inception, its ruling theocrats engaged in mass murder, hostage taking, and torture. The regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, constructed an artifice dependent on terrorism, building the scaffold that would send countless men, women, and children to their deaths. First, the regime liquidated its leftist allies who had brought about the fall of the Shah, then it turned outward, against the civilized world.
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Khomeini isn’t the first antisemitic autocrat, with dreams of murdering Jews and destroying America, to meet his end in a bombed-out bunker. We hope but do not trust that his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will be the last.
Before Khomeini had even solidified his grip on power, his minions had taken the U.S. Embassy in Tehran hostage, holding its staff for 444 days. In the 1980s, Iran sent its agents to neighboring countries. Like Lenin before him, Khomeini sought to export his revolution. As historian Ray Takeyh has noted, Khomeini and his acolytes wanted to launch a new “Islamic epoch” with Iran at its epicenter. It was to be a “revolution without borders.”
Accordingly, the Islamic Republic spread its terror far from its shores, making satrapies of Lebanon, Yemen, and much of Syria and Iraq. Iranian proxies operated with abandon in Bulgaria in Europe, Nigeria in Africa, and Argentina, among other places, and fomented untold death and destruction along the way. Tehran remade the Middle East vastly for the worse.
In the 1980s, less than a decade old, the regime embarked on a campaign of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering Westerners, from CIA station chiefs to journalists and any who else who dared question its millenarian vision. The Iran-Iraq War, in which Khomeini battled Saddam Hussein, was the bloodiest conflict since World War II, with casualty estimates exceeding more than 1 million. It lasted for nearly a decade, sputtering out when Khomeini ran out of bodies to throw into the slaughter. Khomeini and his apparatchiks could not have cared less about the human cost; it gave unarmed children plastic “keys to paradise” for martyrdom on the front lines. He sent them to clear minefields by simply running across them.
Dozens of terrorist groups can trace their start to the Iranian regime. Tehran wholesale created Hezbollah, once labeled the “A Team” of terrorists, with an arsenal greater than most nation-states. Iran’s tentacles stretched to any Islamist movement, Sunni or Shia, that sought to vanquish the United States and destroy Israel. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, and others all received support from their patrons in Tehran. All are terrorist groups. All have blood, American and otherwise, on their hands.
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There is an old saying from antiquity: those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. The Islamic Republic was born of bloodshed, and it eventually fell prey to its own hubris and propaganda. Madness involves a detachment from reality, and the mullahs of Iran had become mad.
Tehran spent three decades attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. Over the span of six presidencies, the mullahs sought to deceive the U.S. and the world about their nuclear ambitions. Every president since George H.W. Bush sought to stop them. Countless negotiations ensued. But the Iranian leadership was consistent in its dishonesty and perfidy. The regime successfully bought time and played the West for suckers.
The Islamic Republic was given multiple chances to end its nuclear weapons program. Time and again, the regime refused. Karim Sadjadpour, a well-regarded analyst of Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimated that Tehran’s nuclear program cost the region at least $100 billion in sunk costs.
This money could have been spent improving the lives of Iranian citizens. But that was never the regime’s objective or concern. Revolutionary terrorism was. That is why Iran couldn’t have been allowed to have nuclear weapons. It is also why Iran was never going to give them up.
The regime and its founders, including Khamenei, were messianic ideologues who wanted to remake the Middle East and the world in their twisted image.
Only the U.S. could have stopped them.
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Israel, while capable of precise and daring operations, could not have acted alone. The courageous Iranian people, always the regime’s first and foremost victims, were unable to topple the regime’s entrenched terrorism apparatus by themselves. Before Operation Urgent Fury and Khamenei’s death, Iran slaughtered at least 32,000 Iranians while most of the world did nothing. The United Nations, which is a morally bankrupt institution if ever there was one, and that feckless vapour, the “international community,” did nothing, at least nothing unless you count their pusillanimous skepticism and carping against the U.S. and Israel.
The era of doing nothing or indulging the regime in its games is over. The Islamic Republic is headed to the ash heap of history, joining other failed tyrannies. It was a course set from the regime’s inception. But it took America to make it happen.