Iran Exposed

In 2002 Israel revealed to the world the existence of an advanced Iranian nuclear program. The previous year, in his first State of the Union address after September 11, President George W. Bush had included the Islamic Republic in what he called the “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea, and he later encouraged the people of Iran, “held hostage by a small clerical elite,” to “win your own freedom.” In 2005 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—a prototype for the untamable populists who now run much of the world—caused consternation in the West and exhilaration among many Arabs when he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

Those events raised questions that have kept analysts of Iran busy ever since. Will the Islamic Republic go to war with Israel and the US, will it be overthrown—whether by foreign powers, revolution, or a combination of the two—and will it build a nuclear bomb? No longer are these the remote contingencies they appeared to be two decades ago when I was living in Iran and reporting in these pages on Bush’s “war on terror.”

The Islamic Republic is already engaged in a sordid undercover war with Israel and the United States that until recently consisted of assaults by proxy forces, assassinations, and acts of sabotage. Iran has relied on a combination of distance and deniability to protect itself from the full force of Israel’s incomparably better-equipped military. But the war has come closer to Iran since Hamas, one of its proxies, launched its hideous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Benjamin Netanyahu started to reorder the eastern Mediterranean, first by obliterating Hamas in Gaza, which he has only partially achieved, and then, on October 1, 2024, by invading Lebanon with the aim of extirpating Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, which is based there.

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