Melanie Phillips in the Times on the need to confront the theocrats in Tehran:
Is the end game approaching with the Islamic Republic of Iran? Ever since this revolutionary regime came to power in 1979, it has waged war against the West. It repeatedly declares its intention to wipe Israel off the map, regularly screams “Death to America” and denounces Britain as even more of a historical enemy.
Its fingerprints have been all over most major terrorist attacks. The potentially lethal combination of its Islamic fanaticism, global aggression and the nuclear weapons it is now on the verge of attaining has given the free world sleepless nights for decades.
Suddenly, however, the regime looks vulnerable. Its strategy of hiding its murderous activities behind proxy armies lies in ruins.
Israel is under attack by Iran on no fewer than seven fronts. Tehran’s strategy is to encircle Israel by a “ring of fire” through attacks by proxy armies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the West Bank. Iran has also directly attacked Israel twice, once in April and the second time last week with a barrage of some 200 ballistic missiles.
In Gaza, however, Hamas is all but finished. Last month, in the space of two weeks, Israel decimated Hezbollah in Lebanon.
It eliminated the commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force in one missile strike. It disabled some 3,000 senior Hezbollah operatives through simultaneously exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. And it wiped out Hezbollah’s entire high command, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah — and then, one after the other, the two men appointed to succeed him.
This extraordinary achievement has transformed Israel’s mood. Although the rockets and missiles continue to fly from Lebanon (as well as some from Gaza), the Iranian enemy has been knocked for six.
Hezbollah had between 150,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles pointed at Israel from southern Lebanon. From the day after the October 7 Hamas-led pogrom in southern Israel, Hezbollah has kept up a daily bombardment of northern Israel, causing the year-long evacuation of more than 60,000 families.
Iran relied on this fearsome arsenal to deter Israel from attacking its nuclear facilities. But now Hezbollah and Iran are in disarray, knowing they have been totally penetrated by Israeli intelligence and are accordingly unable even to communicate with each other.
As the former UN weapons inspector David Albright has commented: “If ever there was a time — justified, called for, less risky — to consider seriously damaging Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, that time is now. Iran is on the cusp of building nuclear weapons, while witnessing a seriously damaged ‘ring of fire’ deterrent. The odds of the Iranian regime building nukes has just gone up, yet it is uniquely vulnerable.”
Most Israelis now want and expect the Israel Defence Forces to attack Iran directly. Rumours are rife that the IDF will cripple Iran economically by bombing its oilfields or will attack its nuclear facilities. This might even encourage the millions whom the regime has oppressed for so long finally to rise up and overthrow it.
Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, seemed to have the regime in his sights last week when, in remarks directed at the Iranian people, he spoke of the moment when Iran is “finally free”, which would “come a lot sooner than people think”.
Such an attack by Israel would remove a major threat to the West too. Yet astoundingly, western leaders regard any such attack by Israel, rather than Iran, as a threat to the regional order.
The US president, Joe Biden, opposes any attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites or oilfields. In the past few days, his administration has been bribing and blackmailing Israel not to attack certain Iranian sites, promising extensive diplomatic backing and significant military assistance if it desists — and the opposite if it goes ahead regardless.
Ever since October 7, the Bidenites have been putting heavy pressure on Israel not to attack Hezbollah or Iran. The US has responded only limply to dozens of attacks on American interests by Iranian proxies.
Appeasement of Iran has been the policy for years of both the Biden and Obama administrations. Their view, bizarre as this may seem, is that Shia Iran is an important player in a new Middle Eastern order in which a balance against the power of both Sunni Saudi Arabia and Jewish Israel will produce “stability”.
At the root of this fantasy is the liberal article of faith that all conflicts are amenable to negotiation and compromise. There’s a corresponding refusal to grasp that the only way to deal with a non-negotiable, fanatical regime is to bring it down.
History teaches that appeasement doesn’t prevent war. On the contrary, it ensures a war that’s infinitely more terrible than it might otherwise have been. From Hitler to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, this is a lesson the West still refuses to learn.
The Obama policy of appeasing Iran – continued by Biden – has surely been one of the most disastrous turns in recent Middle Eastern history. That Iran is an implacable foe to everything America stands for should surely be obvious to even the dimmest bulbs in Washington, but a determination to be the "nice" president with the lovely smile after a bellicose Bush – plus an inability to make those tough decsions on, say, Syria – means that billions of dollars have been released to help the Iranian regime survive, and the ridiculous JCPOA limps on as testament to a misplaced trust in Iran's reliability. Tehran is tottering, millions of its people – and especially its women – are desperate for change. But Biden will continue the prevarication, aiming his criticism not at the mullahs but at an Israel fighting for its survival.
However, what the Bidenites and the rest of the West fail to understand is that when Israel said after October 7 “never again”, it meant it. The Israelis want the genocidal Iranian regime — responsible for so much Israeli and Jewish slaughter — to be neutralised and will stand for nothing less. They don’t want war. They simply have no choice.
Mick Hartley 