The Western world is suffering from a lack of imagination. A dangerous one.
That’s because most of it regards the “Iran conflict” as a localized conflict between the US and Iran. And seeks to resolve it in an agreement, not in the vanquishing of Iran. But we are in effect in a world war.
And the stakes are no less weighty than those of the war that consumed the world from 1939 until 1945.
There may not be widespread combat between multi-member sets of nations like the Second World War’s Allies and Axis powers. But there are global confederations facing off here all the same, even in the absence, for now, of boots-on-the-ground onslaughts and invasions.
On one side stand Iran, Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah, along with Iran’s behind-the-scenes but fully invested enablers Russia and China, both of whom provide political, economic and military-technological support to the mullahcracy.
And facing them are the US and Israel, along with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt. Largely passive but declared allies include Canada, the Czech Republic, and several Baltic and Balkan states.
And nervously fidgeting on the sidelines, at least presently, are Western European countries like the UK, France and Germany. The sideliners’ hesitance to declare their allegiance to the anti-Iran Allies recall our own country’s stance in World War II before Pearl Harbor.
What they haven’t comprehended is that Iran’s rulers are determined to develop nuclear weapons, and that, left in power, their threats against civilized nations will proceed from pipe dream to reality horror show.
Iran’s mullahs may not harbor the Hitlerian goals of territorial expansion or pursuit of “racial purity.” But they seek hegemony all the same. Not of a nationalistic sort but of a religious one, a jihad. They want their brand of Shia Islamism to dominate the world.
The world.
And that’s why we are, appearances aside, in World War III.
While much of their rhetoric about spreading a radical form of Islam focuses on the so-called “Shia Crescent,” a more revealing goal was voiced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the engineer of Iran’s transition in 1979 from a Western-aligned monarchy to its current Islamist regime.
He repeatedly preached that the purpose of the revolution was not only to remake the Middle East in his radical image but to eventually impose Shia Islam on the entire world.
The revolution “will not end with one Islamic state in Iran,” he declared. Once his dream government comes into being, he announced, “none of the governments now existing in the world” will “be able to resist it,” and will surrender to Islam.
The Islamic world is a complex and varied one. Most Muslims are not radicals and have no designs on world domination. But substantial parts of both the Shia and Sunni worlds embrace hatred of “infidels”—non-Muslims—and the use of violence to further their goals.
The sects themselves—the Shia comprise around 15% of the world’s Muslims, and Sunnis the rest—have been in conflict with each other for centuries. Khomeini declared that the revered cities of Mecca and Medina, situated in Sunni Saudi Arabia, were in the hands of “a band of heretics.”
But the radicals of both groups put their theological differences aside when it comes to the Western world. Hamas, for instance, is Sunni and Hezbollah is Shia; Iran supports both. As Chazal teach us, hatred blurs lines.
Whether or not the mullahs ruling Iran today choose to publicly extol Khomeini’s vision of global domination, it is their ultimate goal. And ignoring that fact, as much of the world is doing, changes it not a whit.
The upshot of that fact is that regime change alone, something millions of Iranians pine for, is not the answer. It will, unfortunately, likely require a ground invasion, the arming of rebels and attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure.
The UN will shriek “war crimes!” But when Iran recently bombed a power and water desalination plant in Kuwait, it was silent.
There are no Marquess of Queensberry Rules when engaging a viper.