It appears a disturbing number of people would gladly see the survival of the world’s worst regime, which reportedly killed more than 30,000 people in two days, destabilises the Middle East and has plotted countless acts of terror on our shores, so long as it means egg on the face for Donald Trump.
Spend a bit of time browsing our most respected media outlets and you will come away thinking precisely what the mullahs want you to think: the U.S. and Israel stumbled into combat without a coherent goal, without a proper strategy and without an adequate plan for protecting the Strait of Hormuz. Regime change from the air, our armchair experts scoff? Idiocy. War without revealing your plans to the world? Amateurish. The allies are heading for a shellacking and it serves them right, too. The Iran war is doomed to failure. Intellectuals and media are now conjuring up better propaganda than anything Tehran could produce.
What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they realise that if this campaign fails, the world – in which their children happen to live – will take a far more dangerous turn? Some just hate Trump. Others cleave to a pacifistic faith in diplomacy; others harbour a guilty fondness for Iran, which, they think, hates the West as much as they do.
So let’s give the lot of them a reality check. With oil prices surging, the costs of war, both economic and in terms of human life, deserve to be taken with the utmost gravity. But the Middle East was facing the gravest of situations already. This is a regime with a tripartite strategy – ballistic missiles, overseas proxy militia, nuclear weapons – literally to trigger the apocalypse, which, according to its dogma, would herald a new dawn of global sharia domination. Diplomacy hadn’t worked, appeasement hadn’t worked, espionage hadn’t worked, even limited airstrikes hadn’t worked. What was the alternative?
Israelis understand what is at stake. Support for the campaign is high across their society, even as they huddle in bomb shelters amid the sound of explosions overhead. Gulf states whose defensive strategy once involved maintaining a degree of friendship with Iran are now urging the US to hold its nerve and finish the job. The Iranian people are desperate for the regime to be overthrown and cheer Israeli and American strikes as they rain down around them. But the West seems to know only the language of defeat.
One of the most contemptible claims is that fighting Iran will only make it more dangerous : “With every assassination, US and Israel are engineering greater radicalisation of Iran’s leadership”. However, the Iranian regime was pretty radical to begin with. This is pure appeasement.
The fact is that the American-Israeli alliance is subjecting Iran to a stupendous battering. Vast destruction has been visited upon their missile and drone programmes, as evidenced by the precipitous fall in their launch cadence, which has reduced by 90 per cent. The allies have been intensifying attacks on underground storage facilities, hitting them so hard that their entire munitions supply chain is being laid waste. Iran’s coastal defences are gone. Its naval defences are gone. Allied pilots enjoy total freedom of the skies, having destroyed Iran’s air defences. Fuel depots have been hit. The Ayatollah himself has been killed, together with scores of other commanders. The regime’s apparatus of suppression, such as Basij checkpoints, is being degraded with great precision.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed in war. Only a fool makes predictions. The Iranian regime may fall, or it may survive in some form. One thing is certain, however: night by night, the worst regime in the world is being robbed of its power to hurt us by an alliance whose byword is courage.