On Iran

The Ayatollah needed to go, but what's next?

Good riddance to bad rubbish. We were all sick of hearing “Death to America,” and suffering their attempts to kill us by a thousand little cuts. The largest was in 1982 when they blew up a Marines barrack in Lebanon. The answer was never Iran-Contra, the convoluted strategy that funded right wing rebels in Latin America with a guns-for-money scheme that damaged the Reagan administration and only made Iran stronger. Hindsight being what it is, President Reagan should have ended them right then and there.

It’s long past time we rid the world of a murderous, corrupt regime that has proxies across the Middle East. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is the military arm of the theocracy. It funds violently militant anti-Western groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza.

Jimmy Carter could have taken decisive military action in 1979 to nip these lawless theocrats in the bud. The failed hostage rescue attempt in April of 1980 was too little, but not necessarily too late. So much bloodshed could have been saved forty-six years ago.

It’s too early to know how Iran shakes out. The attack was bold. If it’s successful, meaning regime change for the better—not a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”—kind of regime change, they will build statues of Donald Trump in Tehran, and he’ll deserve them.

But that is a galactically huge “if.”

If it fails, chaos will ensue. My grave concern now is that there is no plan other than decapitating Iran’s leadership and tossing the keys to an unorganized and unarmed populace in the hope that they’ll know how—and have the wherewithal—to affect real, positive change. The kind of change a brilliant and educated population deserves. Change that moves half the population—the women—back into the mainstream. Change that allows personal freedoms like the right to gather, demonstrate, and speak freely.

The reason for the first-ever daylight raid that kicked off this war was that Israeli intelligence, which has more spies in Tehran than there are merchants selling Persian rugs, knew that the Iranian leadership was gathered in one place.

In 1979, the revolutionary forces that brought down the Shah of Iran were not military. They were clerical. The revolution was planned and executed from Paris. Everyday Iranians, sick of the Shah’s brutality, fought in the streets to bring Ayatollah Khomeini to power, unwittingly invoking the law of unintended consequences, trading one brutal dictator for another. Nearly five decades later, they find themselves stuck in the twilight zone between the Seventh Century and the Twenty-first.

In the beginning, the ayatollahs nurtured the nascent IRGC. They needed a military that could fight off enemies both foreign and domestic. They funded the Revolutionary Guard, and set its leadership apart from the people, lavishing them with the best housing, food, equipment, etc. The IRGC members lived better than ordinary Iranians, and resentment grew. But the IRGC had the guns, and each successive attempt at protest brought out the men on motorcycles. They had guns, and indiscriminately killed protesters. Then the penitentiary buses rolled up and demonstrators were prodded like cattle aboard these vehicles with wire-mesh windows. They disappeared into the unthinkable hell of the infamous Evin House of Detention.

Over time, the roles switched, and the mullahs gave governing power to the Revolutionary Guard. It was a good bargain for the ayatollahs who could then settle into their preferred contemplative mode, issuing directives and fatwas while keeping their hands clean. The theocrats made their decrees, but the IRGC implemented policy, and did the dirty-work of enforcement.

That’s what makes this moment so fraught. Taking out religious and military leadership means we’re on the razor’s edge now. The IRGC is not giving up its power without a fight—no one ever does. Air power has brought us to this moment, but without somebody’s boots on the ground, how will the people be able to resist the IRGC and build the kind of representative government they long for? Years of propaganda mean significant members of the population won’t stand for an Israeli or American occupying force, although President Trump has not ruled it out. It is a miscalculation to think American troops will be met with rose pedals lining the streets any more than we were twenty years ago in Iraq.

That leaves either the United Nations whose peacekeepers have generally been about as potent as a Nevada boxing commissioner, or a hastily assembled Arab League force, which brings with it a centuries-old battle between religious enemies—the Arabs are Sunni Muslims, and the Iranians are Shiite.

Now add the mercurial Trump to the mix. Mr. “No foreign wars” is no model of consistency. Anything could still happen.

It’s a pickle.

©2026 Jon Sinton