Hit Iran Hard
Iranian imperialism is deeply entrenched. It will not be uprooted without overwhelming force
Throughout history, it has occasionally been difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when wars break out. In his controversial study on The Origins of the Second World War, the British historian AJP Taylor observed that wars often begin “raggedly.” Taylor elucidated the point by drawing attention to the conflict in the “midnight in the century” that marked the depth of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Beliefs about the starting point of the Second World War vary widely depending on political geography. The Russians date the war to June 1941, the Chinese from November 1937, the Abyssinians from October 1937, and the Americans from December 1941.
If the long-running “shadow war” between Israel and Iran should escalate into a full-blown shooting war, future historians will have comparably little difficulty marking the outbreak of the Israeli-Iranian war. It will be easy enough to discern its origins in the flagrant aggression on October 7, when hordes of jihadists streamed across the Gaza border and slaughtered almost 1,200 Israelis. Although many people didn’t recognize it at the time, Hamas, though not acting at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was nonetheless trying to effect one of the theocracy’s core objectives: the destruction of the Jewish state. Equipped and empowered by Iran, the Palestinian holy warriors represent a crucial pillar of the Shiite regime’s strategy to create a “ring of fire” around Israel.
Military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum is that the supreme act of judgment is to understand what kind of war you are fighting. But judgment is not the same thing as decision. After Hamas launched its vicious assault last October, prominent Israelis instinctively felt they had been visited by the furies of the revolutionary regime in Tehran. However, in deference to the White House, which urged a strictly limited response, Jerusalem refrained from striking back directly at the masters of terror. Even the Lebanese Hezbollah, the first and favorite foreign child of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, was spared Israeli wrath.
The bitter fruit of Israel’s coerced reticence came this week with a second ballistic missile attack courtesy of Iran. In contrast to its meekness after the first Iranian salvo this past April, however, the Netanyahu government can now be expected to respond with considerably less restraint. It will not squander another opportunity to retaliate against its mightiest enemy, the source of so many of Israel’s woes and fears. Credible reports cite Iran’s nuclear facilities as potential targets for Israeli warplanes, along with Iran’s oil rigs and air defense systems.
Such robust measures to counter Iranian belligerence are long overdue, but they will nonetheless prompt vituperative denunciation in anti-Zionist quarters. Critics of a muscular response to Iran’s indiscriminate attack––which, thanks to Israeli and American air defenses, caused limited damage in Israel but took a Palestinian life in Jericho––insist that an armed riposte will only entrench the “cycle of violence.” This counsel of de-escalation omits that Western statecraft has long accommodated Tehran only to see the outlaw regime redouble its commitment to Shiite imperialism. During the maximum accommodation of the Obama era, the Revolutionary Guards’ expeditionary outfit, the Quds Force, stepped up its campaign to spread Islamic revolution across a range of theaters with evident swagger. Before he was dispatched in an airstrike ordered by President Trump, Qassem Soleimani––the plenipotentiary of this Islamist imperium and the second most powerful man in Iran after the Supreme Leader––boasted that “our borders have spread.”
The sources of Iranian conduct inhere in the revolution that birthed the Islamic Republic in 1979. This world-historical event brought to power for the first time an Islamist regime in full control of a nation-state and guided by a theocratic project intrinsically opposed to every norm and principle of the international system. In a way, the ayatollah’s revolution was a Rousseauian undertaking to eviscerate established governance and lay the groundwork for a new order. A truly revolutionary regime, its central feature was and remains implacable hostility, in word and deed, for the established order of nations––especially the United States and Israel, the “great Satan” and the “little Satan,” respectively. Iran’s rulers have occasionally gestured at defusing tensions with the West, but these attempts have been short-lived. “Since 1979,” writes Karim Sadjadpour, “Iran has sought to expel the United States from the Middle East, replace Israel with Palestine, and remake the region in its image.”
Among the very first exploits of this Islamist regime was its 1979 seizure of the American embassy and the taking of hostages in violation of the core principle of the Westphalian system, diplomatic immunity. For the subsequent four-and-a-half decades, the Iranian regime has waged an open war on the states in its midst, with a special focus on targets representing American power and interests. Its mission to extirpate Israel and eject American influence is a key component of that larger strategy to make Iran the sole hegemonic power over the entire region and all Islam beyond.
In pursuit of hegemony in the Middle East––from the Levant through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf––Iran has leveraged its power and menaced the Jewish state by means of a formidable “axis of resistance.” These well-trained and well-armed surrogate forces––primarily Lebanese Hezbollah, but also Hamas and the Houthis––had been the handmaidens of Iran’s pitiless ascendancy. Until recently, as Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh have pointed out, this design worked well enough, “perfect[ing] Islamist imperialism on the cheap: Proxies spread the faith and mauled Iran’s enemies while shielding it from direct retaliation.”
In just the past year, Iran has further revealed itself as the major obstacle to any decent regional order. It has intensified its brazen campaign, through Houthi proxies, against commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It has used other Shiite forces in its foreign legion to harass and kill American troops standing sentry in allied countries. It enabled and encouraged Hezbollah to open a second front with Israel after October 7 by firing nearly 9,000 rockets and missiles into the Galilee. It even appears to be trying to assassinate Donald Trump, according to reporting by The New York Times.
Very little of this record of depravity and depredation has given pause to those in the West seeking a modus vivendi with Tehran. Since the 1989 death of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, plans for a rapprochement have been de rigueur in the corridors of power from Washington to Brussels. Given the secular temperament and modernist inclinations of the Iranian masses, particularly among its large college-educated population, this optimistic vision is easy to understand. Political change in Iran would allow it to become what it used to be until the mullahs took over: a valued member of the civilized world. But despite Iranians’ broad and deep opposition to theocracy and a predatory foreign policy, the Islamic revolution’s ferocious enmity toward the United States and Israel continues unabated. It is inconceivable that it will jettison that ideology regardless of the cost to Persian civilization or even its grip on power.
Last week, as citizens of the Jewish state made their way into bomb shelters and Israel’s anti-missile systems went into overdrive to defend cities and towns from the incoming Iranian missiles, a noteworthy message came out of the White House. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan responded to the barrage against Israel by promising “severe consequences” for the Islamic Republic. He added that Israel would not be alone in imposing those consequences.
Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of “evidence against interest”; in other words of deciding that a political position carried more weight if it came at the expense of the person holding it. (The conservative writer John O’Sullivan offered an unbeatable example: If the pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job; if he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be on to something.) Thus, when Jake Sullivan affirms that Iran has crossed a line and deserves swift punishment, it is prima facie worthy of serious consideration.
After all, it was Sullivan, in his capacity as then-Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, who led the secret negotiations with Iran in 2012. As part of the Obama national security team, he played a crucial role in bringing Iran in from the cold in the hopes of creating a new security architecture in the Middle East. President Obama’s gambit, his central foreign policy concept, was balancing traditional American partners like Saudi Arabia and Israel against the Islamic Republic. It was believed that the elevation of Iran in the regional order would alleviate sectarian conflict while simultaneously uplifting local powers to take on more responsibility for security.
From the start, this priority was evident in Obama’s conciliatory approach toward the clerical regime. When Iranians took to the streets en masse to protest against fraudulent elections in 2009, Obama offered little sympathy to the Green Movement in order not to alienate the mullahs. For the same reason, he resisted imposing sanctions on the clerical regime until congressional pressure forced his hand. The Syrian rebellion was another episode where Obama’s determination not to antagonize Iran forbade any intervention against its blood-stained client.
Although appeasement of Iran reached its apex in the Obama era, it has recently been revitalized. President Biden has generally refrained from highlighting Iran’s role in plunging the region into war and so leniently enforced oil sanctions that Tehran has been able to fill its coffers with an estimated $30 billion in revenue. The United States even pledged to free up $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil revenues in exchange for the release of American hostages last September—the equivalent of paying ransom. It was only after the Hamas attack on Israel that Washington and Doha agreed to hold up those funds’ dispersal. The final months of his term supply a final chance for Biden to reverse course and undo some of the damage wrought by America’s prolonged abdication.
But however much the wishful thinking of the foreign policy elite has been battered by events, it shows no signs of being discarded. Opponents of a hard-line position against Iran like to imagine that escalation can always be prevented by Western restraint. This is erroneous. Iran settled on a course of constant violence and mayhem long ago, when it fused theological absolutism with the powers of a sovereign state, the velayat-e Faqih. The only way to stem the blood-dimmed tide that is engulfing the region is to act without further delay to arrest the rise––and, with any luck, hasten the decline––of the revolutionary regime that seeks to bend the proud nations of the Middle East to its will.
Instead of constraining Israel’s impending military campaign, Washington ought to join it and ensure that it has far-reaching success. In addition to restoring much-needed military deterrence against the Islamic Republic, punitive strikes should also aim to hinder its nuclear program. According to the U.S. government, Iran is a mere week or two away from breaking out to produce enough uranium for one atomic bomb, though it could take it several months to field a nuclear weapon. If the cause of non-proliferation means anything to the custodians of American power, now is the time for them to prove it.
Since the end of the Second World War––its conclusion was more definite and decisive than its origins––American hegemony has been a fixed point of reference around the world, not least in the Fertile Crescent. Whether it remains so will be determined by a wide array of factors. But one of the most consequential will be the decision it takes––or refuses to take––in the coming days to seize the initiative in what are still the opening stages of the Israeli-Iranian war. If it does not choose wisely, we may soon be faced with an even more cataclysmic war. In this brewing conflict, America and its allies have declined to pay the price for peace for too long. One way or another, the result will be that it pays the price of war.