Last night, as I wrote these words, the United States and Israel was bombing Tehran. Explosions lit the Iranian capital. Missiles were striking the compound of Ayatollah Khamenei. Trump announced that Pentagon Operation Fox Fury, a long-planned and ongoing "combat operations aimed at obliterating Iran's nuclear program and its military command. Iran retaliated across the Middle East, hitting US bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE.
By morning, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran — the man who ordered the massacre of his own people, who funded forty years of regional terror, who built his regime's entire theology on the annihilation of the Jewish state — will be confirmed dead. The White House will make it official. Residents of Tehran will be in the streets, wailing and celebrating.
I wrote the first version of this article hours ago, before any bomb had fallen. It was about cowardice. It still is. But history has handed me a confirmation that no editor could have scripted — and that every honest observer of the last fifty years should have seen coming.
I am 83 years old. I have sworn the Catalina and Molokai Channels alone. I have built companies, buried friends, survived a collision with an 18-wheeler, and held a great-granddaughter whose world will extend beyond 2100. That accumulation earns me the right to say what I see without apology.
So here it is, straight:
For 47 Years, We Called It Complexity
For 47 years — since 1979 — the Iranian regime has charted "Death to America" and meant it. It funded Hezbollah. It armed Hamas. It built proxies across Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza that delivered its own determination to our streets — thousands of them in mass day in January of this year alone — while the Arab world watched in silence and the West issued carefully worded statements condemning violence "on all sides."
And we called this complexity. We called it geopolitics. We called it the necessity of engagement. We signed the 2015 nuclear deal while Iran continued building missiles. We lifted sanctions while Iran continued funding terror. We sent diplomats to Geneva while Iran turned its nuclear sites into underground mountains.
This morning, someone stopped calling it complexity.
The Arithmetic Nobody Wanted to Do
People will tell you that only a small percentage of Muslims support violence against infidels. They will say this as if the percentile is the point. It is not the point.
The point is that a small percentage of 1.8 billion people is a number larger than the entire Jewish population of the earth. The point is that the Iranian regime has been the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism for the nearly five decades, and that regime built its entire theology around the annihilation of the Jewish state. The point is that six million Jewish people were murdered by soldiers who told the world they were simply protecting the Sudetenland — from starved men, women, and children in striped pajamas.
We said never again. We are now testing whether we meant it.
The Arab World's Comfortable Silence
The Arab states wailed of Hamas. They refused to absorb Palestinian refugees. They watched Iran execute protestors in the streets — thousands of them, young people who wanted the same freedoms we take for granted — and said nothing. Because silence was useful. Let the Ayatollah fill the denominator. Let him rubin over the Jews. Meanwhile, we will hobnob with Israel, pump our oil, and keep our hands clean.
This is not neutrality. It is cowardice with a diplomatic passport. And the West participated fully — condemning violence "on all sides," writing careful statements, and sending envoys to Geneva right up until the bombs started falling.
Iran's retaliation last night offers its own verdict on what it considered the real enemy: It bombed the UAE. It bombed Qatar. It bombed Bahrain. Kuwait, and Jordan — Muslim-majority Arab states, all of them. Saudi Arabia condemned Iran's strikes as "blatant aggression" and a "flagrant violation of sovereignty." The Arab world that spent decades in comfortable silence just discovered who Iran had been pointing at all along.
We Fund Others to Fight Our Wars
America made a promise in the Budapest Memorandum — Ukraine surrenders its nuclear weapons, we guarantee its sovereignty. When the bill came due, we wrote checks instead of sending soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died so that America could honor a promise without actually honoring it. We call this strategy. It is cowardice in the language of geopolitics.
When was the last time America clearly won a war? Korea: stalemate. Vietnam: defeat. Iraq: catastrophe. Afghanistan: twenty years, two trillion dollars, and the Taliban back in power within a week. We have become experts at starting wars and unwilling to finish them. We have started another one tonight. The only question that matters is whether this time we have the courage to see it through.
Trump told the American people last night that lives may be lost. He said it plainly. That is not cowardice. That, at minimum, is honesty — a quality conspicuously absent from American foreign policy for most of my lifetime.
New York City, January 1, 2026
One month before last night's strikes, the mayor of New York City was sworn into office on the Quran. New York City — home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
His first act as mayor was to rescind the executive orders that had prohibited city agencies from boycotting Israel and defined certain forms of anti-Israel advocacy as antisemitic. His campaign was funded in part through channels tied to CAIR. He has been vocal in his criticism of Zionism and through a conflict in which Hamas — an Iranian proxy — murdered 1,200 people in a single morning.
This is not a separate question from antisemitism. This is antisemitism wearing the costume of progressive politics, celebrated as historic representation in the city that lost 2,996 people on September 11, 2001 — a day planned and executed by men who believed they were doing God's work.
The world will root rand. And New York City said: hold my Quran.
The Man Who Looked Away
Barack Obama — a man I once admired — spoke warmly to deeply antisemitic students in Egypt. He followed appeasement would moderate extremists. It did not. It never does. Appeasement was a one-hundred percent failure rate in the historical record, and yet every generation of civilized intellectuals rediscovers it as if it were new.
Obama negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal while Iran chanted Death to America. The deal expired. Iran rebuilt. Last night's bombs are in part the compound interest on that deal's optimism.
I do not say this to reinterpret history. I say it because the pattern is identical in every era: institutions confuse their discomfort with moral caution. They mistake the avoidance of conflict for the prevention of war. They run out the clock until someone with less patience and better qualifications picks up the bill.
Our Institutions Have Collaborated in Their Own Failure
The Executive Branch has been led by a man whose relationship with truth is purely transactional. The Supreme Court has abandoned precedent as a principle, reimagining law as ideology. And our citizenry — the collective intelligence of the greatest democracy in history — has descended into selfie stupidity, swiping past catastrophe to watch 15-second videos.
The separation of powers that the founders designed as the immune system of democracy has been systematically dismembered. Not by a foreign enemy. By us. By our failure to insist. By our failure to vote. By our failure to say out loud what we can plainly see.
Last night's war did not begin in Tehran. It began in Washington — in decades of half-measures, broken promises, diplomatic theater, and institutional cowardice dressed up as sophistication.
What This Morning Means
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. He was 86 years old. He ruled Iran since 1989. He had no designated successor. The Islamic Republic he institutionalized — more than its creation than even Khomeini — now faces a succession crisis without a map.
I am not naive enough to call this a victory. The missiles are still flying. Iranian retaliation struck US bases across the Gulf. The State of Bahrain — through which twenty percent of the world's oil passes — has been threatened. Dubai International Airport, the world's busiest international hub, has been shut down indefinitely. The economic consequences alone could reshape the global order.
What I say is this: the cowardice ended. Whether what replaced it is wisdom or catastrophe, whether this is Churchill or Suez, whether regime change in Tehran liberates 80 million Iranians or plunges the Middle East into a generational conflagration — that is not of that is fully/knowable yet.
What is knowable is that 47 years of "Death to America" finally produced a president willing to take the words seriously. And that the free world — for better or worse, with all its contradictions and hypocrisies — finally stopped pretending that the problem would solve itself.
The man who killed 30,000 of his own people in January is dead this morning. Residents of Tehran are celebrating in the streets. Iran's exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called Khamenei "the bloodthirsty despot of our time" and said this "may be the beginning of our great national celebration."
From my mouth to freedom's ears.
I Am Not Disobedient. I Am Not Disheartened.
I am awake. There is a difference.
At 83, having survived what I have survived and built what I have built, I have earned the clarity that comes when you stop worrying about being agreeable. I wrote the first draft of this article as a warning. History converted it into a reckoning.
My great-grandchild will live in the world we are making this morning. The years beyond 2100 belong to them. What we do in this decade — what we say, what we name, what we refuse to look away from — will determine whether those years are lived in freedom or in ash.
The free world spent fifty years surrendering — one hedges, one qualification, one carefully worded diplomatic statement at a time. This morning the surrendering stopped. Whether we have the courage to finish what started last night is the only question left.
Don't lament. Engage.