Editor: The reader must recall that Stephens was the editor of the The Jerusalem Post from From 2002 to 2004?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 23, 2026

Editor: The first two paragraphs of Stephens column

President Trump appears poised to order strikes on Iran — indeed, by the time you read this column, he may already have done so — while barely bothering to spell out his reasons. The lack of explanation is a serious moral and political mistake: At the very least, Americans deserve to know what they’re getting into, why, for how long and for what result.

But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a compelling case for action. Three, in fact.

Editor. Under the rubric ‘At the very least, Americans deserve to know what they’re getting into, why, for how long and for what result.’

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Iran poses a threat to global order by way of its damaged but abiding nuclear ambitions, its deep strategic ties to Moscow and Beijing, its persistent threats to maritime commerce and its support for international terrorism.

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It poses a threat to regional stability, not just through its support for anti-Israel proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, but also by its meddling in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and (until the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime) Syria.

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And it’s a mortal threat to the life and safety of its own people, many thousands of whom it slaughtered last month. There was a time not long ago when Americans, both left and right, cared enough about human rights to believe it could, in some circumstances, justify military intervention.

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Editor: This all carefully laundered via ‘a compelling case for action’ !

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The regime has lost much of its nuclear infrastructure; watched its regional proxies be overthrown, decimated and incapacitated; presided over the implosion of its economy; and lost whatever domestic and international legitimacy remained to it.

The regime has lost much of its nuclear infrastructure; watched its regional proxies be overthrown, decimated and incapacitated; presided over the implosion of its economy; and lost whatever domestic and international legitimacy remained to it.

No wonder protests in Iran have resumed, this time among university students who are bravely undaunted by the terrifying risk. Their protests seem connected to the 40-day memorials for the victims of last month’s massacres. But it’s not a stretch to assume those protests are also a signal to Trump that his promise last month to Iranians that “help is on its way” hasn’t been forgotten, and that ordinary Iranians are prepared to join the fight for their own liberation.

If so, then there is at least a reasonable chance that a sustained military operation that not only further degrades the regime’s nuclear, missile and military capabilities — a desirable outcome in its own right — but also targets its apparatus of domestic repression could embolden the type of sustained mass protests that could finally bring the regime down. Even more so if the leaders who give the orders, including the supreme leader and his circle, are not immune from attack.

For all of its willfulness and the evil it has wreaked over 47 years, the regime does not stand 10 feet tall. It nearly fell during the 2009 Green Movement against that year’s fraudulent elections. It nearly fell again in 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.

The difference on those occasions was the absence of external military support. Donald Trump now has a unique opportunity to provide it. Despite the risk that military strikes entail, the bigger risk, in the judgment of history, would be to fail to take it.

Editor: To the Zionist Loyalist like Stephens, and his fellow travelers, the imagined future articulated in his column, presages an inevitable future?

Editor.