Saturday’s campaign by the United States and Israel to rid the world of Iran’s despotic leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has turned into a full-fledged war and is growing by the hour.
President Donald Trump said that what he initially envisioned as solely an air campaign could potentially involve “boots on the ground.” And rather than “go big and go fast,” as projected by Vice President JD Vance, American attacks could last four to five weeks, if not longer.
For two generations, Iranians have been persecuted by a radical Islamist regime whose power has included the proxy militias of Hezbollah and Hamas that have terrorized the Mideast.
On the global front, Iran has been racing to develop nuclear weapons; a frightening thought in the hands of such a bloodthirsty ruler.
While Trump clearly sees himself as a hero for taking out Khamenei, our scale tips to that of a warmonger. Such actions open the door for further aggression by others.
Trump posits that destabilizing Iran’s theocratic regime will open the door for democracy.
Our choice of words would be chaos.
Trump said he’s done the hard work for Iranians by taking out Khamenei, and that it’s now up to them to “take over your government.”
“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” he said in the Friday night post on social media. “Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond.”
But Iranians have never had the freedom to organize a protest movement. There is no viable opposition in the country.
And now that Iranians are “free,” our guess is that Trump has no interest in helping them further their dreams.
This assumption is from present experience. The Trump administration treats the U.S. Constitution cavalierly, trampling Americans’ rights by evidence of racial profiling by immigration agents, unlawful search and seizures, efforts to curb voting, quashing our rights to free speech and the right to assemble, the recent fatal shootings of American protesters, and overriding state sovereignty by sending in U.S. troops to oversee mass immigration raids.
Leading up to Saturday’s attacks, Trump has been vague as to why Iran poses a threat, leaning on his default response that Iran planned to launch a nuclear attack against the United States.
But a 2025 federal government assessment debunks that claim, citing the June 22, 2025, attacks again by the United States and Israel on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities has set back its nuclear capabilities by a good 10 years.
Facts withstanding, the U.S. and Israel have continued to pummel Iran’s infrastructure, civilian buildings, schools, and military installations. This isn’t about regime change. It’s about wiping Iran off the map.
America First
Trump has always said he has no interest in nation-building, but after capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3 and now the murder of Khamenei, that’s obviously not true.
Where it leads us is the bigger question.
In Venezuela, it appears the trade-off is to allow it to remain as repressive as ever in exchange for giving the United States control over its massive oil reserves.
