Do not listen to the defeatists that gloomily dominate American and Israeli airwaves this weekend driving a double sourpuss narrative – that the war against Iran was politically vain and/or militarily futile. Both accusations are nasty; neither is accurate.
The six-week war was the most moral and necessary campaign, and it has dramatically changed the strategic picture for the better. Iran is cadaverously deadened and the US and Israel are hegemonically strengthened. When the fight continues – not this month or even this year, but down the road – the "allies" will even more decisively defeat the "axis" so much easier.
Of course, the need to ferociously fight on is not what most Israelis want to hear now – as they blessedly send their kids back to school, rebuild their shattered homes, and overall try to restore some semblance of normalcy to life.
But nobody in Israel is under the illusion that the struggle against evil is over, and nobody should dare question the morality of Israel's need for ongoing and crushing victories over its adversaries.
Israel will not return to the "containment" policies of recent decades that prioritized restraint and diplomacy over enemy degradation and military triumph. Israel's changed security paradigm involves proactively asserting dominance along its borders and strategic ascendancy against threats farther away. Operation Roaring Lion was an excellent demonstration of this, as is the current Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Expect Israel to continue to make fierce and overwhelming moves against enemy strongholds from Sidon to Khan Yunis and Isfahan. It will attack, not defend. It will initiate, not respond. It will hunt down its enemies, not be hounded by them.
Israel needs to be feared, not loved. And it is a resilient country, not a wet rag that meekly accepts international restrictions and absorbs Western denunciations.
Therefore, regional and world leaders should get used to a revamped Mideast strategic situation anchored by a hard-hitting Israel.
Jerusalem knows that its neighbours will seek true reconciliation only when Israel is strong. Additional Abraham Accord-style peace treaties are possible and desirable, even with Saudi Arabia and perhaps this year, but these will be based on muscular defense partnerships, not mushy notions of goodwill.
IF THERE IS one major reason for disappointment with the current pause/end in operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion it is the fact that regime change in Iran seems far off.
While this was not one of the formal goals of the war (as opposed to stripping Iran of its ballistic missile and nuclear weapon capabilities), everybody knows that without a counterrevolution in the radical Islamic republic, the war's attainments can be considered only temporary. And there was a moment when overthrow of the ayatollahs seemed at hand.
Was the opportunity missed? Not necessarily. In fact, a rout of the ayatollahs (– those ayatollahs who escaped Israel's successful, broad decapitation crusade against 50 top genocidal clerics) may still be coming soon.
My guru on this matter is Mehdi Parpanchi, executive editor at Iran International TV and former Iran Service Director at Radio Farda. He was the most incisive analyst throughout the war.
Parpanchi explains that battlefield metrics are a poor measure of political reality. Political systems do not always collapse during war. Often, they collapse in the aftermath, when military failure gives way to elite fracture and a society no longer willing to live as before.
Consider the aftermath: Iran's economy is in dire condition. It was so before the war, and the destruction wrought to Iran's industrial and export base by the 30,000 coalition bombs is gargantuan, almost unsurmountable. Let us hope that US President Trump keeps Iran under a heavy regime of economic sanctions.
On the strategic level, the assaults on Iran on June 2025 and March 2026 exposed the gap between radical Islamic propaganda and reality. For years, Ali Khamenei and his IRGC commanders boasted about indigenous air-defense systems. They told Iranians that even the most sophisticated US and Israeli aircraft could not operate over Iran. Billions were spent developing these systems and building an image of invulnerability. That myth collapsed on first contact with reality.
Furthermore, for years the Islamic Republic spoke of control over four Arab capitals, of a powerful Shia crescent across the Mideast. It presented itself as a power on the march – expanding, advancing, and shaping the region around itself. When Assad fell, when Syria was lost, and when the proxies took crippling blows, that image began to collapse. What had been presented as strategic depth looks increasingly like an expensive illusion.
Internally, the 12-day war shattered the regime's image of competence, control, and strength. Much of the population that opposed the regime saw it humiliated and were openly pleased to see it struck so hard.
The events of Jan. 8-9, 2026, marked a decisive shift in Iran's political landscape, according to Parpanchi. In Tehran, an estimated 1.5 million people took to the streets, with similar scenes repeated in 400 cities, with total participation reaching five million people. The state responded with lethal force that killed an estimated 36,000 people in 48 hours. According to Parpanchi, the scale of the violence shattered the narrative that the Islamic Republic still ruled with some measure of public consent. A state that still commands genuine consent does not need to kill on such a scale to clear the streets.
THEREFORE, the Islamic Republic may have somewhat survived this war, but it is unlikely to survive the peace. It is a regime in collapse phase, Parpanchi asserts.
The US and Israel must now push the regime over the edge. They can do so by choking Iran economically (no sanctions relief); by maintaining military pressure on Iran (no withdrawal of American forces from the region); by diplomatically further isolating Iran (no soft European or Gulf Arab overtures to Iran); by strategically humiliating the ayatollahs (take away their enriched uranium); and by finally getting serious about supporting the emergence of a muscular Iranian opposition movement (supply them with weapons).
All this will encourage the chances of widespread defections among military and other Iranian elites.
In sum, nobody should join the hypocrisy of the "West's weepers" for the Islamic Republic or help the mullahs evade the utter rout that is their inevitable lot. ("Nauseating weepers" is what Brendan O'Neill calls all those outraged about America's strikes on Iran, but who were silent when the ayatollahs slaughtered thousands of their countrymen in the streets).
Nobody should bow before the agents of depression in America, Europe, or Israel who peddle a jaundiced, politically malign account of this just, successful war.
And nobody should doubt the ability of Israel to withstand and win its wars, again and again, as necessary.
