For years, a particular kind of person has warned us about World War III.
You know the type. They appear on television in dark suits, speaking with great gravity about red lines and proportionality and the catastrophic dangers of provoking Tehran. Any action against Iran, we were told, would set the region ablaze. Possibly the planet. The mullahs, in this telling, were not a terrorist regime racing toward a nuclear weapon. They were a geopolitical fact of life, to be managed, appeased, negotiated with, and above all, not provoked.
Israel, in this telling, was always the provocation.
That argument has now had its field test. And the results are instructive.
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a campaign targeting Iran’s military infrastructure, its nuclear program, and the leadership of a regime that had spent four decades building a terror empire across the Middle East. The response from the people who warned us about World War III was swift. They took to their television studios and their op-ed pages and said the word “escalation” many times, in many languages, with great feeling.
Then Iran fired back.
Tehran didn’t just hit Israel. Tehran launched missiles and drones toward Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Oman, Iraq, and Turkey. Over 2,000 projectiles at Arab neighbors. Missiles struck Dubai’s airport. High-rises in Manama. Kuwait’s airport was hit as well. Smoke rose over neighborhoods in Doha. Iran, the regime the World War III crowd said we mustn’t provoke, was firing at every country in the region simultaneously.
The people who were going to cause World War III turned out to be the ones trying to stop it.
Then Iran Fired Back
Iran’s president reportedly apologized to neighboring states for the strikes and ordered the armed forces to stand down. The Revolutionary Guards continued anyway, exposing a leadership rift the regime could no longer hide. So the regime that was too dangerous to confront couldn’t even control its own military. And the regime that was supposedly about to trigger Armageddon has, by day sixteen, had its supreme leader killed, its missile production degraded by 86 percent, more than 90 naval vessels damaged or destroyed, and over 6,000 targets struck.
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