SHAPIRO: Israel's stunning victory over Iran and two big lies debunked

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This week, Israel finally unleashed its firepower against Iran’s nuclear program in a devastating feat of intelligence work, technological competence and war planning. The Israelis not only caught the Iranian regime flatfooted, but they devastated Iran’s war-making capacity, degrading Iran’s missile launchers by half, its nuclear program by up to 90% and its top military layer almost entirely. 

All of this was the result of years of meticulous planning. 

For decades, Iran built up a bevvy of terror proxies from Iraq through Syria and Lebanon, into the Gaza Strip and the so-called West Bank, and down to Yemen. It radically increased its ballistic missile capacity. Iran’s proxies killed hundreds of Americans across the region, attempted to destabilize regimes ranging from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and provided the muscle for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran threatened Israel’s destruction daily and cursed America, all while building nuclear weapons. Just last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. According to Israeli intelligence, the Iranians were on the verge of achieving a nuclear breakout that would outpace Israel’s ability to hamper the program. With Iran’s air defences gone after battling Israel last year, the window for action was closing. 

So, Israel acted. Having spent nearly two years decapitating Iran’s proxies one by one, Israel quickly established an air corridor from Israel to Tehran, using both Mossad agents on the ground and Israeli Air Force assets from the air to thoroughly wreck the Iranian regime’s military and nuclear capacity. 

All of which is an unfettered good for the West. 

A nuclear Iran, as President Donald Trump has said for decades, is a threat not just to Israel but to the West. A nuclear-armed Iran could easily take control of vital waterways ranging from the Red Sea to the Strait of Hormuz. It could threaten American allies ranging from Israel to the United Arab Emirates to Jordan to Saudi Arabia while pursuing destabilizing terror uprisings and could even use a nuclear umbrella, with improved intercontinental ballistic missiles, to threaten Europe or the United States directly if it sought to do so. 

The first rule of a rational foreign policy is to take geopolitical enemies seriously when they openly threaten your destruction every single day. 

Israel took that threat seriously and acted. And the world is better off. 

Yet, some on the American political right seem disturbed by Israel’s success. Some worry, inaccurately but understandably, that America might be drawn into a broader nation-building operation in Iran — something Trump certainly will not do and that Israel has not requested. Even if Trump were to authorize a series of strikes on the Iranian underground nuclear facility at Fordow, that would not amount to an Iraq-like nation-building operation; it would far more clearly resemble Trump’s heroic vapourization of Iranian terror-master Qassem Soleimani in 2020. 

Others bizarrely seem to see Israel as the fountainhead of evil in the world — a perverse moral perspective that turns reality on its head in favour of conspiratorial fantasy. Some of these people hide behind a pseudo-realism that pretends to see an Iranian nuclear capacity as less of a regional threat than strikes on the Iranian nuclear capacity, warning of a Third World War, a nuclear holocaust that will somehow emerge from Israel preventing a nuclear Iran. 

Whatever the purported justification for inaction, Israel — and Trump’s open support for Israel’s operation — has proven such doubters wrong. It turns out that the best way to end the threat of a nuclear Iran is to end the threat of a nuclear Iran. It turns out that peace through strength requires actual strength to achieve peace, and that peace through isolationist weakness ends not in peace but in regional conflagration, ongoing for decades. 

With the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program, two lies die: The lie that only negotiations can end the threat of a rogue state seeking nuclear weapons and the lie that every conflict must necessarily become Iraq. Both of those lies deserved to die grim deaths. And, like the Iranian nuclear program, both have been obliterated in this show of Western muscle against the radical Iranian regime.