The most important facts about the Iran war are obvious to every informed person in the world. They are, in approximate order of significance and clarity, that the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the most odious regimes in the history of the nation state, is detested by a majority of the Iranian population, and has produced provocations for decades that would justify declarations of war from many countries as it has been the principal state sponsor of terrorism for all of its 47-year history.
It is also evident that Iran has sustained one of the most one-sided drubbings in the history of war between serious countries: The United States and Israel inflicted more than $1 trillion of damage on the Iranian military, both conventional and its nuclear development program, at a loss of less than 50 of their own people including 35 Israeli civilians. There were only 3,500 claimed fatalities amongst Iranian civilians—one death for every seven airstrikes. Like so much of the recent performance of the United States and to a lesser extent the Israeli armed forces, these statistics represent an astonishingly efficient and humane level of precise targeting.
Because President Trump is such a blunt and outspoken American nationalist and a man of the common-sense right—a populist capitalist who detests the intellectual corruption of the academy though he is a well-educated man, and the snobbery and cowardice of the establishment though he is a very wealthy man, and above all the malicious dishonesty and philistinism of the national political press—and because he has been so successful, personally and as president, there is a great reservoir of unspoken and sometimes even unconscious hope amongst millions of people who should know better, that the United States not be successful in this war.
This has caused a lot of absurd reporting comparing the Iran war with that of Vietnam, where the American involvement was eight years with U.S. casualties totaling 58,000 dead and over 300,000 wounded, and the ultimate result, albeit years after the departure of the Americans, was the victory of the North Vietnamese enemy. In the case of Iran, the principal objective of denying the regime a nuclear weapon has been accomplished for at least the next several years, and all suggestions that little has been achieved by American actions are outrageous falsehoods. Without Trump’s intervention, Iran would by now have deployed intermediate missiles with nuclear warheads capable of reaching London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and everywhere in the Middle East. The absence of a general state of thanksgiving in the world that the United States has prevented this is a distressing reflection on the state of international opinion, including in Canada.
The European powers offered no assistance in keeping open the Strait of Hormuz, through which many of them receive much of their oil, and even prevented the United States from using its own bases on the territory of its European allies to support actions against Iran, conducted on behalf of the entire civilized world—and even, if only incidentally, on behalf of less civilized governments including China’s. The United States has also substantially achieved the second goal beyond nuclear arms prevention: reopening the Strait of Hormuz as a service to the world, since the United States itself, an energy self-sufficient country, only imports some fertilizer from the Persian Gulf.
It is also obvious that the long-sought and painfully sanguinary pursuit of peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved while the present regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran is devoting most of its resources to the intimidation of its neighbors and the preparation of the attempted extermination of the people and state of Israel. The end of the economically and socially extremely successful 28-year reign of the Shah of Iran was in no small part due to the blunderbuss interventions of President Jimmy Carter, bringing on the ayatollahs and their bone-crushing despotism and bloodthirsty aggression. There has been no serious response until that of President Trump to Iran’s endless outrages, directly and through its puppet terrorist organizations. The infamous Obama nuclear agreement, if carried out to the letter, would have Iran today a full-fledged and internationally accepted nuclear military power.
Iran creates murderous chaos throughout the Middle East, as it did when it unleashed the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and as it has during the current war by raining missiles as heavily as it can down upon unoffending Arab neighbors to drive them in fright into the arms of the Americans, begging for a ceasefire. Until this capability is ended, there will be no peace in the Middle East.
Rounding out these obvious facts are that no agreement with Iran has any validity since it will immediately be violated proudly and ostentatiously by the regime. So the best course—fully justified by international law and essential for the successful pursuit of peace and a satisfactory reorganization of the Middle East—is the resumption and escalation of the war against Iran, combined with an airtight blockade of that country to bring its government to a state of submission as quickly as possible. Only this will bring peace and permit the transformation of Iran to an inoffensive country capable of and assisted in reconstructing itself after nearly half a century of destructive totalitarian despotism, made even more sinister by the stench of religious hypocrisy.
The United States, with the full cooperation of its official allies and the collaboration of Israel and all of Iran’s immediate Arab neighbors, should do the necessary to restore responsible government in Iran as swiftly and bloodlessly as possible. The Americans and their allies are more than halfway to a solution of this terrible problem at relatively modest cost to themselves. It is time to finish the job.
