Since its founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic has called for the destruction of what its apparatchiks call “Great Satan” and “Little Satan” — the United States and Israel. To this end, Tehran has financed, trained, and even created wholesale a bevy of terrorist groups that target and murder Americans, Israelis, and anyone opposed to the messianic dreams of its rulers. 

Henry Kissinger once asserted that Iran must decide “whether it is a nation or a cause.” But for the country’s ruling theocrats, there has never been a choice. For them, the nation is a cause. And the meaning of that cause has long been clear.

The regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, wanted to launch a new “Islamic epoch” with Iran at the epicenter. Calling for a “revolution without borders,” Khomeini exhorted: “We don’t recognize Iran as ours, as all Muslim countries are a part of us.” 

Indeed, Khomeini and his acolytes have sought the overthrow of countless Middle Eastern monarchies and governments, including longtime American allies in the Gulf, whose stability runs counter to their pursuit of regional domination. To Khomeini, “all of the other regimes in the Muslim world that were not manifestly religious were illegitimate and had to be replaced,” the journalist Ronen Bergman noted. In the years prior to the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini, like other mad men before him, frequently repeated “certain phrases over and over again until they took on the sound of magical incantations,” Bergman observed. “Islam is the only solution” was one of his common utterances, as he began to “portray the world as a clash between good and evil.” For some, it proved to be a hypnotic brew.

In his very first speech after seizing power, the old cleric declared: “Islam has been dying or dead for 1,400 years,” but “we have resurrected it with the blood of our youth … very soon we will liberate Jerusalem and pray there.” 

In many respects, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 is analogous to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Both led to the installation of dictatorships with fever dreams of exporting their twisted ideologies far from their borders. Both had grievances and enemies, many imagined, as central to their animating ideologies. Both promised their followers a utopia if only the “right people” were destroyed. And both would count their own people as their first, and foremost, victims. 

In the nearly half-century that has passed, Iran has waged war on its neighbors, installing its proxies and allies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, much of Iraq, Gaza, and elsewhere. Notably, the Islamic Republic, while of the Shiite sect, has nonetheless supported Sunni terrorist groups, such as Hamas, provided that they serve its goal of regional domination. 

The decades of upheaval and the rise of Islamist terrorism are directly linked to the regime’s creation. As Lawrence Wright recounted in his bestselling book on the road to 9/11, The Looming Tower, a generation of terrorists were inspired by the Islamic Revolution, including Sunni jihadists such as al Qaeda co-founder Ayman al Zawahiri, whose organization, al Jihad, supported the revolution with “leaflets and cassette tapes urging all Islamic groups in Egypt to follow the Iranian example.” As Wright noted: “The overnight transformation of a relatively wealthy, powerful, modern country such as Iran into a rigid theocracy showed that the Islamists’ dream was eminently achievable, and it quickened their desire to act.” 

The many wars that have roiled the Middle East over the past four decades are either unthinkable or unlikely absent Iran’s involvement. The Islamic Republic and its proxies have been targeting and murdering Americans and their allies since the regime’s inception. From the U.S. Marines slaughtered in Beirut in the 1980s to the staggering number of U.S. servicemen murdered and maimed by improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, few, if any, governments have more American blood on their hands.

Iran sought not only to lead the Muslim world but to usher in a new era. Leadership, the regime has long believed, would come from destroying Israel — the “Zionist entity,” as Tehran called it. To this end, its rulers fatefully chose to pursue a nuclear weapons program.

The advent of the program can be traced to the mid-1990s. For its part, the regime has always been clear about its purpose. In 2017, Iran set up a “doomsday clock,” a public timer meant to count down to Israel’s destruction, which its current head, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, assured would happen by 2040 or sooner. In one of several instances that signaled the regime’s decay and decrepitude, power outages forced the clock to go offline briefly in 2021. Steadfastly devoting resources to waging a genocidal, millenarian war is not conducive to good governance.

Indeed, like antisemitic dictators before them, the rulers of Iran have been single-minded in their efforts, forcing their people to endure sanctions, hardship, internal unrest, and repression, so they could obtain the means to wipe Israel off the map. Considerable resources were expended, not only for Iran’s nuclear program, but to support terrorist groups the world over in service of the regime’s goals. Iran’s tentacles stretched far from the Middle East, with its proxies carrying out and plotting attacks as far away as fancy Washington, D.C., restaurants, the jungles of Latin America, and the cobblestone streets of Bulgaria.

In short, Iran wants another Holocaust and has spent a lot of time, money, and effort to achieve this objective. But circumstances are not what they were eight decades ago. There’s now a Jewish state that gets a say in the matter, too.

In the early morning hours of June 13, Israel cast its vote, making the grim but necessary decision to launch precision strikes in Iran and prevent the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism from going nuclear. The operation was dubbed “Rising Lion,” a nod to the centuries of proud Persian history that predate the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which upended both the country and the region itself.

In the span of hours, Israel took out top Iranian military officials and many of the nation’s leaders and nuclear scientists. The war, started by Iran nearly five decades ago, has entered a new phase.

For decades, Iran’s strategy has consisted of building a “ring of fire” surrounding the Jewish state with its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and portions of the West Bank. In military terms, Israel is both qualitatively and quantitatively superior. Accordingly, the mullahs’ hopes have rested on wearing Israel down via a war of attrition while they obtain nuclear weapons. 

The regime has gotten what it long wanted: a multifront war. But it’s bitten off more than it can chew.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and other Gaza-based, Iranian-backed groups invaded Israel, brutally murdering more than 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage. The terrorists proudly filmed themselves massacring innocents. They came into Israeli homes, shooting and torturing family members in front of each other. It was the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. And as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis predicted in the Washington Examiner, it almost certainly eliminated any doubt on Israel’s part as to whether Jerusalem could ever live with a nuclear Iran. There could be no questioning Tehran’s genocidal intentions.

A number of attempts have been made to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, most notably the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, popularly known as the Iran deal. Yet all have fallen short. Indeed, the JCPOA itself didn’t prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons — far from it. Its sunset provisions, lack of restrictions on research and development, and limp verification measures ensured that Iran could eventually acquire nuclear weapons, thereby ushering in an age of nuclear proliferation in a region prone to war and instability. Nor did the JCPOA require Iran to disclose its nuclear history, hampering efforts to measure its progress. Worse still, the Obama administration insisted that the so-called deal not address either Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for terrorism. 

In exchange, Tehran got sanctions relief that allowed the regime to replenish its coffers. Traditional American allies in the region, such as Israel and most of the Gulf, were nonplussed at the accommodationist policy of the Obama White House toward an enemy that explicitly sought their downfall.

Unsurprisingly, Iran violated the lax terms of the agreement. In many cases, arms control deals with rogue regimes aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, and this proved to be no exception. 

On April 30, 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that Israeli intelligence operatives managed to remove thousands of documents, which were later authenticated by the U.S., showing that Iran had not only lied about its nuclear program but was also engaged in hiding it during negotiations with the U.S. and others. A subsequent report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, highlighted new documentation seized by Israel from Tehran’s “nuclear archive,” which “indicates that Iran’s nuclear weaponization efforts did not stop after 2003.” That is: Iran was being less than forthcoming about its program. Not for the first time, the regime lied.

After a thorough review, the Trump administration exited the JCPOA. Other efforts to induce Tehran to participate in fair and forthright negotiations failed. The Biden administration even granted Tehran sanctions relief up front and fatefully removed the foreign terrorist organization designation that its predecessor had placed on the Houthis, Iran’s Yemen-based proxy. These efforts also failed, as Iran played for time, hoping to achieve its nuclear breakout while the West doddled. But hope isn’t a strategy, least of all in the Middle East, and much less when dealing with a terrorist state on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons. Time was on Iran’s side, and the regime, which doubted American and Israeli willpower, knew it.

Tehran also failed to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. On June 12, the agency adopted a resolution declaring Iran in breach of its nonproliferation obligations for the first time since 2005. The IAEA stated that Iran had “consistently failed to provide information about undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple locations,” the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C. think tank, noted. That same day also marked the end of the 60-day deadline that Trump had given the Iranians to come to an agreement. The next day, Israel struck, putting an end to decades of game-playing by a regime that thought it could run out the clock. But now it’s Iran that faces its own doomsday scenario.

In retrospect, there is an air of inevitability to the war that has now commenced in full. As CAMERA noted in June 2022, the Jewish state was never going to let Iran acquire nuclear weapons. This was likely true before Oct. 7, and it was certainly true after. History says as much.

In June 1981, the Israel Defense Forces successfully took out Iraq’s nuclear reactor. And in September 2007, the IDF carried out a strike against Syria’s nuclear program. Notably, Israel carried out previous strikes in spite of condemnations from friend and foe alike.

Israel has been clear: It will not tolerate a hostile power acquiring nuclear arms. 

And yet Iran has proven itself to be equally clear. The regime’s entire identity is intertwined with terrorism and seeking Israel’s destruction. It has continued to march forward in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. But now its own hubris may be its downfall. Not for the first time, a deeply ideological totalitarian state has fallen victim to its own propaganda. Israel is not, as the mullahs would have it, a temporary aberration; a “spider web” that can easily be swept away. Instead, it is the region’s military superpower, the economic, technological, and qualitative edge of which dwarfs an Iranian opponent that had to spend hours in a search and rescue mission when its decrepit helicopter carrying its president mysteriously crashed in May 2024.

But the regime’s overconfidence is hardly unusual. The 20th century is littered with the remains of totalitarian states whose ambitions outran their capabilities. 

There’s an old adage about hubris: “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.” The ruling theocrats of Iran, drunk for decades on their own power, certainly fit that description. And now they’re reaping the whirlwind.

Tehran’s “ring of fire” wasn’t just a means of waging attritional war against Israel. It was also a safeguard to deter an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Hezbollah, the largest and best-armed terrorist group in the world, de facto controlled Lebanon, to Israel’s north. The war that Iranian proxies launched on Oct. 7 enabled Israel to degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities severely, including taking out its infamous leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in addition to countless top commanders and operatives. Israel had removed the knife that the regime held to its throat. And when Iran launched drone and ballistic missile attacks on Israel in April and October 2024, the Israelis not only intercepted the majority of attacks, but they also took out the majority of Iran’s air defenses. From there, the course was set.

Other circumstances have conspired to give the Jewish state greater room to operate. Bashar Assad, Syria’s longtime dictator and a charter member of Iran’s “resistance axis,” has been toppled. The smuggling routes for Iranian weapons, enabled by Assad, went with him. While questions loom over Syria’s future, Iranian influence on that border state has been severely diminished. And to Israel’s south, the IDF has taken out top commanders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Tehran-backed groups.

Israel has another ace up its sleeve: an unsurpassed intelligence capability. Indeed, the opening hours of the war showcased why Jerusalem is a key American ally. The Jewish state reportedly built a drone base inside Iran and carried out precision strikes, taking out nearly all of Iran’s top military leaders, as well as many top nuclear scientists. In one strike alone, in what has to be one of the greatest decapitation strikes in history, no fewer than two dozen Iranian commanders were killed simultaneously.

The majority of suspected nuclear sites were also hit, although many will likely require repeated bombing runs. Importantly, to curtail the anticipated Iranian response further, Israel prioritized degrading the regime’s ground-to-air and ballistic missile capabilities. Israel had achieved almost complete air superiority, an essential component to winning a modern war. As the IDF put it: “The road to Tehran has been paved.”

The next day, Netanyahu spoke to the Iranian people: “In the past 24 hours, we have destroyed senior military commanders, prominent nuclear scientists, the Islamic regime’s most important enrichment facility, and a large part of its ballistic missile arsenal. Another operation is underway. The regime does not know what power has hit them or what power will hit them. This regime has never been so weak.” In another speech, he said: “We have indications that senior leaders in Iran are packing their bags — they sense what’s coming. I’ll tell you what would have come if we hadn’t acted. We had information that this unscrupulous regime was planning to give the nuclear weapons that they would develop to their terrorist proxies.” Such an occurrence, the Israeli premier noted, would be “nuclear terrorism on steroids.” 

Trump called the attack “very successful,” telling CNN’s Dana Bash: “We, of course, support Israel, obviously, and supported it like nobody has ever supported it.” In other remarks, the president pointed out, “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal.” The Trump administration and many U.S. lawmakers have been unequivocal in their support for Israel, while the usual suspects in Europe limply worried about “stability” in the Middle East, a chimera if there ever was one. For its part, the Iranian regime has largely relied on bluster and threats broadcast via its official media and the usual fellow travelers in the West. Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid decried Israel as a “rogue state that constantly undermines both U.S. interests and values.” And the New York Times asserted that Iran’s “ring of fire” was merely a “grand defense project” — an inversion of the truth.

THE FUTURE OF THE PALESTINIAN MOMENT 

Some Iranian ballistic and drone attacks have bypassed Israel’s Iron Dome, striking the Jewish state and causing death and destruction. But the overwhelming majority have been intercepted. By contrast, Israel effectively owns Iran’s skies.

Of course, hubris can cut both ways. Iran, unlike its proxies, possesses the resources and capabilities of a nation-state. It is not just a terrorist group but a terrorist state. Israel shouldn’t be overconfident. More death and destruction await. Yet Israel’s early success calls to mind a speech that Winston Churchill gave in 1942 after a British victory at El Alamein: “Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” 

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.