I’ll leave it to military and intelligence experts to offer more comprehensive and detailed analyses of the still-underway U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran’s regime, but two breathtaking realities have become unavoidably clear, even to relatively casual observers. First, the United States and Israel have achieved exquisite and deep intelligence penetration of the regime. Second, the regime is dying alone, suffering global isolation.
The former point should have been undeniable after Israel’s incredible 2024 assassination of a top Hamas leader within Iran’s capital city. Ismail Haniyeh was killed inside an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “safe house” by a bomb the Israelis had planted there approximately two months prior, according to reports. This masterstroke did not resonate the way that it should have. It showed that the Jewish state’s intelligence services were not just operating in Tehran to a stunning extent, but they were doing so with significant high-level inside help. And it wasn’t just any element of the regime that had been compromised — it was the vaunted Guard.
Last summer, the regime suffered a far greater blow, with Israel’s 12-day war destroying its air defenses, providing total air superiority for American and Israeli planes over Iranian territory. This allowed U.S. bombers to drop “bunker-busters” onto multiple nuclear sites, crippling the regime’s illicit and genocidal program. As I noted over the weekend, the fact that the regime has already begun to rebuild that program, refusing ultimatums to abandon its nuclear ambitions, even with its very existence in serious jeopardy, tells us everything we need to know about its fanatical leaders’ motives and priorities. Speaking of those leaders, they’re now dead. Virtually all of them. The Israeli military published a graphic of the top echelons of the regime, featuring 15 “most wanted” men, from the ayatollah on down. Every single one of them has now been eliminated, and then some. This is another intelligence feat that boggles the mind.
The location of the erstwhile so-called “supreme leader” was reportedly sniffed out and tracked for months by the CIA, which handed the information over to the Israelis, who took him out when the time was right. The regime’s penetration was so complete that Israel was evidently able to collect images of Ali Khamenei’s corpse and deliver them to President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before Iranian state media even announced the killing.
For their part, Israeli intelligence officials were made aware of a key in-person meeting of top regime figures, which they promptly struck with deadly accuracy. They also pulled off something similar last summer, to say nothing of the epic pager-bomb operation against Iran’s Hezbollah army, as well as their accompanying assassination of Hezbollah’s leader. Between the efforts of the U.S.’s CIA and Israel’s Mossad, a lot of evil people have been brought to ultimate justice lately, in a chain of events triggered by Iran’s strategic catastrophe of supporting and green-lighting Hamas’s barbaric attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Meanwhile, America and Israel continue to pummel a long list of selected targets, from Iran’s naval fleet to its ballistic missile facilities and stockpiles. It’s been a bloodbath for the regime, celebrated joyfully by its victims. What comes next remains a murky and thorny question, but it’s hard to imagine anything worse than this regime, from a geopolitical perspective, for reasons outlined previously. In addition to the shocking intelligence penetration of this Islamofascist theocracy, it’s also been startling to see the utterly isolated state in which it finds itself. Iran’s “friends” in Russia, bogged down in their own failing quagmire elsewhere, have done nothing.
Their Chinese Communist Party allies have watched from afar, perhaps wondering what to do about their various evaporating sources of oil. The Arab world has rallied against the regime, with condemnations of Tehran driven into the open by the regime’s idiotic attacks against multiple Gulf States over the weekend — the Saudis had reportedly been pressing the U.S. and Israel to take out Iran’s regime in private, despite public statements in support of diplomatic negotiations.
The leftist Canadian and Australian governments backed the operation, with the Aussies citing multiple Iran-backed terrorist attacks plotted on their soil. European brass couldn’t be bothered to interrupt their weekends. And the “progressives” running Britain have chosen to clumsily advertise their own irrelevance and self-imposed impotence, which is a real shame. Malign actors around the world are watching this once-feared dictatorship being ritually humiliated and decimated — all while thoroughly compromised and alone.
IRAN AND INTENDED CONSEQUENCES
These same actors also can’t escape America’s precise and flawless operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, which required exceptional intelligence and military capabilities in an entirely separate global theater, carried off just weeks ago. At the very least, the adversaries and enemies of the U.S. are receiving some inescapable, healthy reminders of our unsurpassed power and capabilities. A restoration of “FAFO”-fueled fears among those who wish ill for America is a good thing.
Finally, Americans are getting another welcome lesson in the profound value of our alliance with Israel. We aren’t fighting a war for them, despite what certain influencers may claim. If anything, the truth is closer to the opposite: Our intelligence and military might have been on brilliant display against the Iranian regime, but the lion’s share of the espionage and military dirty work has been carried off, quite triumphantly, by the Israelis. We share many interests with Israel, particularly because their enemies are, generally speaking, our enemies — both abroad and here at home. The top-line result of this effective and lethal partnership is one of the most evil, generational threats to American national security sustaining a devastating-to-fatal blow. That’s an “America First” outcome, which also happens to benefit Israel existentially. Win, win.