Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Iran’s disastrous Islamic Revolution — in which the last Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in favor of a totalitarian, anti-Western, zealous, theocratic Islamist terrorist regime.
The Shah’s ouster marked the end of over 2,500 continuous years of monarchy in Persia. And the West has paid a steep price for the Shah’s ouster. From the Beirut barracks bombing of 1983 to the Argentinian AMIA bombing of 1994 to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa to funding and supporting the 9/11 hijackers to the arming of countless Iraqis with I.E.D.s used to kill Americans during the Iraq War to the arming of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Bashar al-Assad alike to plotting to blow up the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a tony D.C. restaurant to the repeated warnings to annihilate from the face of the Earth the mullahs’ dystopian characterization of the “little Satan” of Israel and the “great Satan” of America, we have been in a perpetual state of cold war with the thuggish mullocracy since the 1979 Revolution.
National Security Adviser John Bolton, a longtime Iran hawk, put it this way:
The Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. was even blunter:
The Iranian regime is, without any serious question, the world’s number one state sponsor and exporter of terrorism the world over. It is a deeply wicked, institutionally evil government that represses, starves, and dehydrates its citizenry at home, foments mass unrest overseas via everything from training proxy Shiite supremacist militias (Hezbollah) to bankrolling genocidal Sunni jihadist groups (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) to orchestrating sundry targeted assassination plots.
And yet, by all accounts, the Iranian citizenry is not nearly as grotesquely anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Semitic as are the citizenries of its regional neighbors. In the Anti-Defamation League’s 2014 global survey of anti-Semitic attitudes, Iran’s citizenry was “only” 56% anti-Semitic — 18% lower than the region-wide average for all of the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, the Iranian populace is less anti-Semitic than the populaces for numerous other Middle Eastern countries whose governments have cold and diplomatically unofficial — though, clandestinely, rapidly warming — relations, such as Saudi Arabia (74%), the United Arab Emirates (80%), and Oman (76%).
The Iranian people need all the support the West can provide them. While President Barack Obama ignored the 2009 “Green Movement” uprising in Iran in his myopic pursuit of the Neville Chamberlain-esque capitulation to the forces of fundamentalist jihadist evil known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (i.e., the Iran nuclear deal), President Donald Trump consistently provided Iranians with moral and rhetorical sustenance during their December 2017/January 2018 clashes with their tyrannical Islamist overlords.
And yet, more is clearly needed.
It was not enough for Trump to extricate the United States from the pure, unvarnished evil that was the Iran nuclear evil. It is not enough for Trump to do all that he has done to empower Israel and our Gulf state allies — such as Saudi Arabia, the United Aram Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman — against the Iran/Turkey/Qatar/Muslim Brotherhood axis of joint Shiite/Sunni Islamism that represents the true systemic security threat throughout the entire Middle East.
It will never be enough until the Islamic Revolutionary regime in Tehran is finally eradicated and forever consigned to the proverbial ash heap of history. Conservatives, post-Iraq War ought to generally be wary of quixotic nation-building crusades and hubristically seeking to project Madisonian democracies onto sharia-sympathetic Islamic nations. But if there were ever a just and prudent example of a morally and strategically worthwhile regime-toppling exercise, from an American national security perspective, it is with respect to the Iranian mullocracy.
Eli Lake recently wrote at Bloomberg:
Too many Western leaders continue to trust [Ayatollah] Khomeini’s successors. Even now, the European Union and former Secretary of State John Kerry are working to save the 2015 deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program. They believe the Iranian regime’s promise not to build a weapon when much of the agreement expires in less than 15 years.
The good news is that millions of Iranians no longer believe anything this regime says. They have endured the terror, deprivation and cruelty unleashed by the Islamic Revolution 40 years ago. The least Americans and Europeans can do is defend and support them and their struggle for a democratic revolution.
The Trump Administration ought to double down in its efforts at thwarting the regime at every possible turn. It goes without saying that we ought to continue smaller measures such as blasting Voice of America throughout the airwaves in Iran, and in generally trying to effectuate direct channels straight to the Iranian people to assist them in overcoming their regime’s repressive infringements on their basic human dignity.
But the Trump Administration also ought to make clear that, in the next prospective, well-organized country-wide uprising akin to the 2009 “Green Movement” uprising that Obama so unfathomably overlooked, the United States will work with our allies to provide direct arms and sustenance to the Iranian people. That is the only eventual outcome for the Iranian people that will ever be truly acceptable. And it is the only eventual outcome for America and her geopolitical allies that will ever be truly acceptable.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran may have hit the tender age of 40. God willing, it will not make it another 40 years. We must always stand with the Iranian people against their thuggish, Islamofascist regime overlords.