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Mar 01, 2026

Editor: A selection from Bret Stephens toxic commentary:

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It’s a bad theory. To listen to the regime’s rhetoric is to be reminded of the Black Knight of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who loses limb after limb while insisting he’s still winning. 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: Bret Stephens is a Zionist Loyalist, his time from 2002 to 2004, as editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post demostrates his political loyelties? Or can that be construed as an instance of ‘Anti-Semitism’ the fallback position of a political opportunist ? Yet with no experience of war, but an utter penchent for sending others to fight his chosen battles: The Neo-Consevative calling card is strewn with the blood of others!

The New Your Times of March 1, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET:

A Tyrant Falls. Dangerous Uncertainty Begins.

Editor : The New York Times like it’s hireling Stephens relpay the Old Cold War platitudes that are replayed again and again: Vietnam, The Iraq War, The War in Afghanistan.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei governed Iran with the vigilance and brutality of an autocrat convinced that his own people and the world’s superpower sought to unseat him — and in the end, they did. With President Trump’s announcement that Ayatollah Khamenei, the 86-year-old supreme leader, was killed in joint American and Israeli airstrikes on Saturday, his reign has come to a close, cementing a lost half-century for his nation. As the Middle East confronts an unpredictable void, let us be clear: No one should mourn the death of a dictator who spent decades inflicting misery and bloodshed.

Ascending to power in 1989, Ayatollah Khamenei organized his existence around an obsession with the West. As a ruler, he squelched dissent, labeling demands for reforms as Western “sedition,” and expanded the intelligence apparatus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to repress his own people. He impoverished his citizens to bankroll foreign interventions and a nuclear program that brought Iran only isolation. When faced with citizens’ protests, he answered with force, including the slaughter of thousands earlier this year. Abroad, his legacy is one of destabilization, having constructed a so-called axis of resistance across Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Editor: The first paragraps of the NYT Opinion The Editorial Board

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Editor: The final paragraps of this ‘Editorial’ again repeats the perenial tropes of American Hegemony/Imperiaism!

The president still has not offered an explanation for why this campaign will end any better than the 21st-century regime change efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan did. Those wars also toppled governments. Yet their disappointing, bloody legacies left Americans understandably skeptical of open-ended military operations.

Amid the chaos this strike will cause in Iran, Americans should brace for the possibility of retaliation. True, Iran has failed to exact almost any meaningful damage on the United States in recent years, and its military has been degraded. But it maintains an arsenal of missiles capable of overwhelming defense systems, and this weekend it hit a U.S. Navy base in Bahrain, among other targets in the region. Iran may also be capable of launching cyberattacks and proxy strikes against American forces and allies.

The bigger risks may lie in the future. The president of the United States has just helped assassinate a foreign leader without the approval of Congress, the support of most allies or a plan for the future. History suggests that unilateral American involvement along these lines often has consequences that are not immediately apparent. When American officials helped orchestrate the 1953 coup, they surely did not imagine that they were planting the seeds for the Middle East’s most radical anti-American government.

Managing the future in Iran will require thoughtfulness, attention and international cooperation. We urge Mr. Trump to work with Congress, but at this point we have little expectation that he will. Given this reality, Congress should play a leadership role; lawmakers from both parties are right to demand briefings and force a debate on war powers to ensure the president is constrained and held accountable.

Finally, the United States cannot navigate the uncertainty alone. The Trump administration, which has frequently treated our allies with scorn, should bring international partners into the fold, too. Confronting a post-Khamenei Iran requires strategic clarity and a global coalition, not isolated decision-making.

For decades, the Iranian people have sacrificed greatly for the prospect of a more open society. After enduring years of autocracy and international isolation, they deserve the opportunity to chart a freer, more stable future.

Editor: The reader must wonder at the inabilitiy of the these self-presented ‘experts’ who across time have caused more human suffering : Vietnam, The Iraq War, The War in Afghanistan. Yet wisdom wedded to self-congatulation is the vocabulary of political bankruptcy!

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