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From here in New Zealand, where most of the sensible ones amongst us still cherish the literal freedoms of a liberal democracy too many take for granted, including our oft-absurd leaders, wannabe leaders and ex-leaders, the news of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death fills me with a straightforward joy.
The supreme leader who presided over Iran’s brutal theocratic regime for 37 years was killed on February 28 in joint US-Israeli strikes on Tehran. Iranian state media confirmed the hit, declared 40 days of mourning, and rushed in an interim council to stop the whole thing from collapsing. This is a moment to celebrate without hesitation, pearl-clutching, or hand-wringing. A tyrant who spent decades exporting death and crushing his own people through outright murder is finally gone. Excellent riddance!
The regime he fronted has imposed ironclad Islamic religious control since 1979. Forty-seven years of covering the highly arresting natural beauty of Persian women and girls, 47 years of a disgusting secret police which would make the East German Stasi blush. Forty-seven years of public hangings on cranes, on any given day – just like in a Handmaid’s Tale, whose author should never have needed a fictional narrative regarding hanging women on “the wall” or blinding them, when she only needed to point at an Islamic country in real time. Forty-seven years of this excuse for a government funding every single jihadist terrorist outfit that would take their filthy money to make war on Israel, Europe, the United Kingdom, America and beyond. And they all did, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Don’t think that the Sunni-Shia divide will prevent Islamic natural enemies from working together. They often have.
Khamenei turned hatred of America and Israel into official policy and made sure no Iranian dared to question it inside their own country. His removal ends one of the darkest chapters in modern history, and that’s saying something when it comes to the Islamic Middle East. I don’t for a minute trust any Islamic country, but if allies emerge to eradicate a sectarian enemy for them – and an existential threat for us, one can only deal with what is available on the board during that time. Thank Trump for the Abraham Accords. May they hold fast.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu did not stumble into this unilateral action. They took their time, chose the moment with precision, and took out Khamenei while he met with his top oppressors.
Retaliation came hard and fast.
Missiles headed for Israel and a stack of Sunni-Arab nations. Some were even fired into a British base in Cyprus. Notice Iran has hit many countries within the Abraham Accords. Flailing around shooting off whatever missiles and bombs they have. They’re cornered, but very dangerous because of their love for something apocalyptic. Theocracies are like that. Yet even Keir Starmer is trying hard to be seen as ‘changing course’, though he is less reliable than some of the Islamic nations in the Accords. He’s a total disgrace to Britain, and hopefully soon to be overthrown.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, spoke on Hannity, finally with the kind of blunt clarity you rarely hear from diplomats, especially not him – usually. He said Iran’s nuclear sites were never about electricity or medical isotopes. They were built for weapons and nothing else. Enrichment had already reached 60 per cent. Witkoff warned they were probably seven days away from enough weapons-grade material to start building bombs on an industrial scale, as in 11 in two weeks. I totally believe that.
Witkoff made it plain: every red line the West had drawn over the years had been ignored or quietly walked past while the centrifuges kept spinning. This was not some civilian programme that got out of hand. It was a mad dash toward the bomb, funded and protected by the very dictator who just got taken out. Witkoff’s words cut through all the old excuses and months’ long thick dragon’s breath. He explained why Trump and Netanyahu decided the time for patience was completely at an end. You do not wait for a theocratic death-cult to finish its nuclear exam hoping against decades of inconvenient facts that it might be peaceful. That was always a gigantic deception – and we knew this since Obama’s pushing of the JCPOA – and so did Trump and Netanyahu. Witkoff and Kuchner fleeing Geneva in the middle of these talks said everything. Diplomacy was done. The regime was intractable in its violence and nuclear ambitions.
If Witkoff and Kuchner have only just arrived at this knowledge, let them be forever known as slightly behind the eight-ball. But methinks this was actually Trump carefully using whatever diplomacy was available to him so that he knows going into the future, whatever it may bring, he possesses a clear conscience that he used every reasonable, tolerant method within his presidential arsenal, before this war went kinetic. And good for him. Orange the Magnificent.
And here’s a thing that I observed in the last 2 months: Witkoff and Jared Kushner stood as the main voices urging Trump to keep talking, to give diplomacy one more chance, to hold back on military action while since the end of 2025, they shuttled to Oman then Geneva, and tried to hammer out some kind of deal with the devil. To eventually piss them off was to piss off the last remaining hope of any US tolerance that could be considered diplomatic. Knowing how the predicates to a war become such a point of wrangling forever more, this may prove to be a sagacious diplomatic endeavour for Trump to have seen out, though frustrating for those of us watching the incredible military build up and the mowing down of Iranian protesters simultaneously. Far too many.
That momentous shift from negotiations to outright war is what makes this moment so satisfying – despite it being long overdue.
Marco Rubio followed up on media with equal force. He stated the American objective without any fudging: the United States intends to completely dismantle Iran’s ability to wage war. Missiles, drones, command centres, and whatever is left of the nuclear infrastructure must be totally destroyed.
The Iranian people have now been given a genuine opening to claim their own liberty. Compared with Iraq and the removal of Saddam, there will not be any formal occupation, just a decapitation of the diabolical status quo.
The regime’s military backbone is being broken from the outside, but the real liberation must come from inside. Iranians themselves have to rise, throw off the mullahs, and pressure their military, their police, their morality police to switch sides away from the IRGC and toward protecting and fighting for the people. If they want a government which respects basic human liberty, they must mount a campaign to wrest it away from the theocrats. Most of Iran, I believe 80 per cent of their people, hate Islam and Islamic rule. They’re overwhelmingly Zoroastrians, secularists and Christians. Allah does not appear to be their god. When the boot lifts even slightly, the courage that has been simmering in Tehran, Isfahan, and the streets of every Iranian city can finally boil over and they must take back their institutions from their frightened, defeated, though blustering bureaucrats, or burn them to the ground and start again.
I still worry about sleeper cells in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, and other quiet corners. Tehran has spent years planting them. They could easily strike back at soft targets and one barbarian in Texas, from Senegal, already has. This remains a raw contest between medieval religious barbarism and the civilised world we defend. Force is required when reason meets fanatics. Let nobody forget that. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some into gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.”
Israel sits right on the front line. America chose unilateral action and Israel carries the heaviest load. The US-Israeli alliance, strengthened by Trump’s Abraham Accords, has never mattered more and has rendered the United Nations utterly irrelevant. Someone should explain this to the ghoulish ex-PM in NZ, Helen Clark. She still foolishly thinks they’re a thing and she may yet have a future as its Secretary General. The joke’s on Uncle Helen.
The Abraham accords brought Sunni Arab states into the same trench against Iran beyond what the United Nations could ever have achieved in a month of Sundays. No small thing. Note that Iran has already hit those same partners in the Accords. Somebody please tell these International Rules-Based Order parrots to catch up with reality. Trump ended your feckin’ order. Now sit down, shut-up and learn something important so that the Free World can continue to be the Free World.
Iran remains distant, but now so much closer to enlightenment – trapped for 47 years in a system that demands total submission and glorifies death. Khamenei’s end has kicked the door wide open. The interim council stumbles along with no clear successor named, though I think Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi would rally serious support if given the chance. He has spoken for years about a secular, democratic Iran and if anyone bothers to watch his many interviews, they’re all over YouTube, they will see an intelligent, careful, considered man who loves his country and has the guts to help move it in the direction of flourishing and freedom. At least he’s as far away from anything Marxist as one could hope a leader in the Middle East to be in these times.
The West must stay resolute: defend Israel without apology and back any genuine freedom movement inside Iran, even if it fractures into factions, which it undoubtedly will. The regime must not be left to fossilise into something disgustingly lukewarm. It must die. No state Islam and no Marxism, which the Kurds are still worryingly partial to.
This war could deliver real peace or slide into wider conflict.
To the eschatological Christians who spot nothing but Armageddon bearing down on us, reading their book of John’s Revelation and seeing apocalyptic patterns and signs everywhere: whatever.
If I had a dollar for every time since Constantine, that the tribulation and subsequent second coming of Christ was prophesied as imminent, I’d be richer than Mrs Croesus. Imagine what was bellowed from Christendom’s pulpits at the time when Constantinople fell into the hands of the bloody Ottomans in 1453.
As Lawrence of Arabia said, ‘nothing is written’. The future is often better than anyone’s interpretations of ancient holy books, thank God – and we all have this thing called free will, which should be thoughtfully deployed in alignment with freedom, goodness and decency, against evil, cruelty and tyranny. That’s a good start to His will being done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.
For now, rejoice. A monster is dead! The world just got a little lighter, though I predict it may get a bit messy for a time. Taking down this monstrous regime has been a long time coming, it should never have been allowed to grow as destructive and inhumane as it showed itself to be, from the very outset of its existence.
Let right be done.
This article was originally published on the author’s website.
