Pundits are exhausting. In their efforts to cover every possible outcome, they end up saying nothing. Their language is convoluted and over-clever, designed mainly to ensure no one can later accuse them of being wrong. Others make matters worse by clumsily digging through history, as if there were a precise template for revolutions. There is no such reality. History teaches, barely, only about itself. Reality is shaped by the people of the moment and by facts tied to time and place.
Commentators are linking what is now unfolding on the streets of Iran to the failed hijab protests. The comparison does not hold. The hijab uprising was an elite revolt led by the secular intellectual class. That class in Iran suffers from two fundamental weaknesses. It is a minority facing a fundamentalist majority, which is why most Iranians stayed home. And when thugs were sent into the streets to spill blood, they fled, and the protest movement withered.
The demonstrators now in the streets are a dream team. On one side are students, on the other, fundamentalists. The students provide the ideological framework, while the fundamentalists bring the fervor and the critical mass. For them, bloodshed in the streets only fuels stronger and wider waves of protest. What is missing from the equation is a single additional factor: external intervention. In Iran, without outside involvement, there will be no revolution.
Iranian society lives in constant dissonance. As a highly intellectual people, Iranians long to connect with the free world and bask in it. At the same time, they are the most conspiratorial nation on earth. Every Iranian you meet will eventually lower his voice and tell you, in confidence, that everything happening is really a conspiracy, British, French or American. It is always a foreign power coveting Iran’s resources. Yet simultaneously, they yearn for a foreign actor with advantages they lack, someone to depend on and then gossip about through made-up theories.
Their affection for Israel stems from two reasons. Israel has never used its military power in an imperial fashion, certainly not against Iran. And they admire an ancient, intelligent people whose intellectual innovation and cutting-edge tools, many of them self-invented, allowed it to defeat all its enemies without fear. That is why, if the first peace agreements Iran ever signs are to be with Israel, Israel must strike the mullah regime. At present, the Mossad is active inside Iran, but I hear of figures in the IDF pushing to let the United States do the job. That would be a grave mistake. The government should ignore them. Israel must strike, because it will be attacked regardless.
President Trump is among the wisest presidents of the United States. He possesses a ‘luminous simplicity’, plain common sense. He never misses an opportunity to straighten a world that has become thoroughly warped by naive progressive neglect
After U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement, only three options remain. One, no external actor intervenes, the uprising fizzles, the mullahs continue to grow stronger and eventually attack Israel. Two, the United States strikes, Iran immediately retaliates against Israel, and Israel responds only after losing the initiative. Three, Israel strikes, with the United States aligned and ready.
President Trump is among the wisest presidents the United States has had. He possesses a luminous simplicity, plain common sense. He never misses an opportunity to straighten a world that has become warped through naive progressive neglect. Successful statesmanship means seeing tomorrow and dealing with it today. Most of us wait for tomorrow to arrive, only to discover we can no longer influence it. That is Trump’s approach to leadership, alongside Marco Rubio, one of the most intelligent and daring secretaries of state the United States has known.
Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th-century philosopher, wrote of the sovereign who comes to impose order on a world ruined by man’s cruelty. That is precisely the story of Judeo-Christian civilization. A sovereign that repaired the world and instilled the eternal biblical values that the axis of evil and Islamic conquest now seeks to erase. The exalted history of the Jewish people is knocking on our door once again, demanding action to save the world. Open the door. We are home. Strike first, and win everything.