‘If Not Now, When?’ Is the Question Over Iran

By Conrad Black

The whole world is waiting for President Trump to disclose his Iran policy. Iran is the key to a decisive turn both in crushing international terrorism and in further strengthening the correlation of forces between the West and its Indo-Pacific allies and this pantomime-horse of an intimate alliance between Moscow and Beijing.

It is 50 years since Anwar Sadat, with the encouragement of Richard Nixon, expelled the Russians from Egypt and began moving toward conciliation with Israel, a courageous and farseeing policy that cost him his life. The Carter and Reagan and the first Bush and Clinton administrations all pursued the two-state solution, necessitated by Britain’s promise of Palestine to the Jews, without compromising the rights of the Arabs, in 1917, when Palestine was still governed by Turkey.

This proved to be a pipe dream as the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, finally announced in 2000 that there must be a return to Israel of everyone who had any claim to having been a Palestinian, thus ensuring the end of the Jewish State and the expulsion, subjugation, or murder of the Jews yet again. President Carter successfully pursued improved Israeli-Egyptian relations but also helped to drive out the Shah of Iran in favor of the horrifying, terrorism-sponsoring, totalitarian pseudo-theocracy of the ayatollahs. Terrorism got into high gear with the 9/11 attacks at New York and Washington; there have been many subsequent incidents in many countries.

This led to President George W. Bush’s simplistic notion that democracies did not unleash aggressive war and that therefore peace could be attained by the promotion of democracy, starting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, both these lengthy and costly campaigns were disasters. The primitive misogynistic dictatorship of the Taliban is back in power in the unfeasible country of Afghanistan, and Iraq is largely under the influence of Iran, the worst possible strategic outcome for the intervention there.

American policymakers apparently had no idea that in many countries, if the public is given its free democratic choice of how it wishes to be governed, it is apt to choose undemocratic government, as in Algeria, where the army has the duty of defending democracy and it intervened in 1992, causing a civil war of ten years, in which 150,000 people died.

In President George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War of 1990 and 1991, the United States overcame its terrible aversion to foreign military intervention following the debacle in Vietnam, and it led a 42-nation coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait, with minimum casualties. It was under the younger Mr. Bush that American boots returned to the ground for extended periods to overseas combat areas. They were volunteer armed forces and the casualties were much fewer than in Vietnam but those wars were not significantly more successful.

Presidents Obama and Biden attempted outright appeasement of Iran, failed to restrict Tehran’s development of rockets or atomic warheads in the Iran nuclear agreement, and permitted ISIS almost to overwhelm the new government in Iraq. Mr. Biden produced one of the most ignominious fiascoes in American history, abandoning cooperative Afghans and NATO allies and allowing the United States to be flung out of Afghanistan like barflies being evicted by a bouncer. Americans should have some idea of how many Middle Eastern countries they have disrupted.

Iran unleashed Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, with the murder of 1,200 Israelis and the seizing of 250 prisoners. Israel, with heavy American assistance, has decisively defeated the terrorist forces that surround it and the two countries together decisively defeated Iran in the 12-day air war over that country last summer, including the destruction of Iran’s military nuclear program.

This led to a countrywide uprising against the ayatollahs who, despite Mr. Trump’s warnings, seem to have murdered between 20,000 and 30,000 dissidents, with Iraqi mercenaries, (indicating the Revolutionary Guard won’t fire live ammunition at Iranian countrymen). Iran is refusing to pledge not to resume its nuclear military program or to end assistance to its terrorist acolytes.

The United States has the forces in-theater to finish the Iranian regime, and it certainly has the casus belli to do so and any such action would be wildly appreciated by everyone except the Russians and the Communist Chinese who find Iran a useful irritant against America. The ayatollahs show no sign of becoming spontaneously acceptable to the civilized world.

This is the opportunity to get rid of this appalling regime, of shattering the forces of terrorism and Islamic bellicosity, all over the world. Iran’s remaining air defenses and the missiles it has stockpiled from Russia and China in the last six months, and all of the apparatus of the Revolutionary Guard should be destroyed from the air and the population invited to complete the task of overthrowing this appalling medieval despotism.

There are naturally concerns about the chaos that might ensue. America must not intervene on the ground and the United Nations cannot be trusted with anything. If the elements identifiable now as leaders of responsible resistance to the ayatollahs can be recognized as a provisional government pending the holding of authentic elections, they can be supported by the United States,  which will control access to Iran by sea, land, and air. Some such regime could  see things through to real elections.

This could be a rough system for a time but there will never be such an opportunity to get rid of the principal source of terrorist sponsorship in the world. Ancient Persia must resume its intermittently distinguished history; peace would be possible in the Middle East, terrorism severely defeated, and Russia and China given a salutary slap on the wrists. “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

First published in the New York Sun