No tears should flow for the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or for his associated butchers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia, and the rest of the Iranian security apparatus. The obliteration—or perhaps one should say, re-obliteration—of the Iranian nuclear program is a good thing, as is the elimination or drastic reduction of its arsenal of drones and missiles, and the weakening of its proxy forces.

In the final hours before U.S. warplanes bombarded Iran today, President Trump wanted to go over the plan one last time. He called the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East to confirm the details of the operation, asking about how the regime in Iran was likely to retaliate and how many American casualties he could expect, according to two U.S. officials who were briefed on Trump’s call with Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command.

“The essence of oligarchical rule,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “is the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.” For nearly four decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presided over exactly that. He did not build the Islamic Republic of Iran. He inherited it from its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1979 led a revolution that deposed a U.S.

The American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without even an attempt to build public support. Above all, it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and without a plan to let them decide how to build a legitimate Iranian state.
This lack of coherence has plagued the Trump administration’s policy for many weeks.

During the past two years, Iran and Israel have traded missile and air strikes three times, and by now, war between them is old news. War between Iran and the Gulf Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, however, is something new. According to reports, Iran fired missiles at all of them this morning. This video appears to show an attack on Juffair, the area of Bahrain that hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.