When the war began at the end of February, in a sequence of opening strikes that suggested that someone, somewhere, had finally thought the problem of Iran through to its end, I shared in a celebration that I now, sadly, recognize as premature. The judgment behind the celebration, however, was, I must insist, sound. The Islamic Republic is not merely a bad Islamic government but the criminal Islamic regime of the age. It is the proof of concept of Islamist revolutionary tyranny and criminality, standing since 1979, and a standing proposal that Islamism could seize a state, hold it for decades, and convert its resources into a machine for exporting terror globally.
Every militia, every doctrine of Islamic armed vanguardism from Beirut to Baghdad, traced its material chains, and much of its intellectual genealogy, to Tehran. Its proxies broke Lebanon, hollowed Iraq, starved Yemen, and helped Assad turn Syria into a mass graveyard. Its nuclear program suspended over an already fractured region the promise of horrors that would make the preceding forty years look like an interlude of calm. A region that has been organized for two generations around the containment of this criminal enterprise could begin to reorganize itself only upon its total collapse. That was my judgment then, and it remains so today. What I did not sufficiently weigh, and only half intuited, was the possibility that a war would destroy the regime’s theological character while leaving its strategic criminality intact if not intensified. Five months in, that is what has happened.
Published originally on August 9, 2026.
Read the full article at the Abrahamic Metacritique.
