All the usual suspects are producing editorials, op-eds and podcasts that conjure up a host of problems that lurk around the next corner and are about to confront the United States and Israel in their conflict with Iran. (Some examples are here and here.)
We’re told that the United States and Israel have no end game prepared, that they’ve begun an open-ended conflict that might turn into (if it isn’t already) a quagmire, that they’re running out of munitions, that aerial bombing can’t cause regime change, that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz will cause worldwide inflation, that there will be a “rally around the flag” effect in Iran that will only make the regime stronger, etc., etc.
Some of these warnings might have some validity, but to focus fixedly on them is to see just a few trees and entirely miss the forest.
Here is the forest: The timeline governing Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb and the ballistic missiles that could be used to deliver that bomb (or other conventional warheads) has been set back by years as a result of the joint strikes on Iran’s military infrastructure.
Furthermore, the Iranian economy, which had been struggling even before this latest conflict, has been additionally weakened. Therefore, Iran’s ability to continue to finance its anti-Israel proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—has been very seriously degraded.
No matter what happens from now until a ceasefire, it will remain true that the murderous theocratic regime in Iran—a regime that has characterized Israel as a “one-bomb country”—is now much farther away from being able to produce and deliver that one bomb. That means that, whatever one might reasonable think could happen in the future, Israel has already won the war with Iran.
It is, of course, true that right-thinking people want to see the murderous Iranian theocracy overthrown and replaced by a much more rational, liberal-minded government. And there is reason to believe that the Iranian people, taken as whole, themselves desire such a change.
However, after disastrous attempts at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, everyone, including U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that only the Iranians can create a new government for themselves. We know new governments were successfully imposed on Japan and Germany after World War II, but that was only with massive Allied troop deployments occupying those nations for years after the war ended. No one is contemplating any such occupation of Iran.
There is, therefore, no guarantee that the regime that governs Iran in the future will be any friendlier toward the United States (the “Big Satan”) and Israel (“the Little Satan”) than was the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, slain on day one of the war. If his son is, in fact, the new supreme leader, there almost certainly will be no thaw. We can expect the son to follow the father in leading Farsi chants of “Death to Israel, Death to America!”
But the persistence of that pathological hostility doesn’t change the fact that Iran has been set back by years in any endeavor to construct nuclear warheads and the missiles capable of delivering them. What the persistence of Iranian hostility means is that Israel must be prepared—with allies, if available, or alone, if necessary—to strike again if Iran makes substantial progress toward those two goals.
The anti-Israel, anti-Trump naysayers will shout “Gotcha!”—insisting that, because Israel might have to strike Iran at some future time, it cannot possibly be said that Israel has “won.” But these people fail to grasp a fundamental truth: We are speaking of events and relations in the Middle East, and that region of the world is quite different from any other.
A vivid example of the difference is that the schism between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam has persisted for more than 1,300 years, and fatal hostilities between them have not ceased in all that time. As recently as 1980, Sunni-dominated Iraq under dictator Sadam Hussein began a war against Shia-dominated Iran, and after eight years of butchery, the result was some 1 million aggregate casualties and absolutely no change in the common border between the two countries—mass slaughter motivated solely by religious differences.
No rational person believes that there can be true peace between Israel and a country whose leader encourages followers in chants of “Death to Israel.” Because peace between Israel and the Islamic regime in Iran is an impossibility, the fact that Israel must always be prepared to strike Iran certainly does not imply that Israel has not won the current war.
It implies only that, until the government in Iran changes in a very fundamental way, Israel must be on guard against religious fanatics in Tehran.
