Let us be clear about what happened on February 28. The United States, in concert with Israel, went to war with Iran. It was not the proxy war of attrition that Washington had tolerated for four decades, not the pinprick retaliatory strikes that have been the preferred narcotic of timid administrations, but real war, with the declared intention of breaking the regime’s military power and ending its nuclear ambitions once and for all.
One hundred days later, the question is not whether this was worth doing. It manifestly was. The question is whether Washington has the fortitude to see it through.
One must consider what has already been achieved, and consider it honestly. Iran’s ballistic missile programme — the crown jewel of its deterrent strategy, the instrument with which it held the entire Middle East hostage — has been largely destroyed. Its navy has been decimated. The nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, into which the regime poured decades of effort and tens of billions of dollars, have been reduced to rubble.
Whatever the carping of intelligence bureaucrats with agendas and axes to grind, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s own assessment was unambiguous: the damage was enormous. The radical regime spent a generation building towards developing nuclear weapons. That project is finished. The degrading of Iran’s military will take years to reverse.
And then there is the supreme leader.
For 37 years, Ali Khamenei was the Islamic Republic. He was its theologian, its strategist, its supreme will. He built Hezbollah into a terrorist state within a legitimate state. He sustained Hamas through every Israeli military campaign. He dispatched the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, to arm the Houthis, and to establish militias across Iraq.
He kept the hostage-taking, the terrorism and the assassination plots running as instruments of state policy — while Western capitals issued demarches, held conferences and imagined that engagement might moderate him. It did not moderate him. It never was going to moderate him. He is gone now, killed on the first day of a war he spent his life making inevitable.
The critics — and there is no shortage of them, in the faculty lounges and the think tank corridors and the op-ed pages of the familiar publications — insist that regime change has not materialised. They say this as though it settles the argument. It does not.
Totalitarian regimes do not fall on a schedule convenient for their opponents. The Soviet Union did not collapse the morning after US President Ronald Reagan deployed Pershing II missiles in Europe. The process of terminal decline is exactly that — a process.
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