OPINION:
During World War II, my father served in the South Pacific. Whom did he think he was fighting? I know from reviewing his letters back home that it wasn’t “the Imperial Japanese government.” He was fighting “the Japs.”
GIs deployed to Europe, I’m willing to bet, didn’t identify their enemy as the Wehrmacht or even the Nazis. They were at war with the Germans — or the Jerries, or the Huns, or Fritz.
That instinct, to name the enemy as a whole people, is understandable in wartime. It’s also often wrong. If we get it wrong, then it’s to our detriment.
Who are America’s enemies today? Not all the people ruled by Beijing, but Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party. Not all Russians, but those who support Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist war in Ukraine. Not all Muslims, but those who embrace Islamic supremacism and jihad.
Certainly not the Iranian people. Ample evidence suggests that most of them despise the clerical ruling class that has suppressed, imprisoned, tortured and murdered them by the tens of thousands.
In 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini led an Islamic Revolution, not an Iranian Revolution. He despised America as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan.” Ali Khamenei, his successor from 1989 until Feb. 28 of this year, was no less hostile toward the West and Judeo-Christian civilization.
Just months after the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Americans were taken hostage by acolytes of Khomeini. Four years later, the regime orchestrated the mass murder of Americans in Lebanon. Since then, it has killed hundreds more Americans, established terrorist proxies in other countries, built an enormous arsenal of missiles and drones, and advanced a nuclear weapons program.
Tehran is now also in an axis with the anti-American and nuclear-armed dictators in Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang.
President Trump made the tough decision to task the U.S. armed forces with degrading and, if possible, defeating this maturing threat. For more than five weeks, American airpower, in partnership with Israel’s, has targeted the regime’s nuclear and missile assets along with its military-industrial base.
The alternative, the approach of his predecessors, was endless diplomatic talkfests — mostly indirect because the regime’s envoys wouldn’t deign to sit at the same table with American infidels — culminating in failed attempts at appeasement.
During those years, most of Washington’s foreign policy establishment held that it was “too soon” to resort to military force. Too little thought was given to how we would know when it became too late to use military force and when it would be impossible to prevent a “nuclear breakout.”
Had there not been a 12-day war last year, the brief conflict to prevent Tehran from reaching a nuclear weapons threshold, and had Mr. Trump not initiated the current operation, would you doubt that those deadlines would have soon arrived? Are you not astonished at how many missiles and drones the regime managed to stockpile since June?
It would be useful for Mr. Trump to remind Americans how we got where we are. Yet last week, justifiably angry at the regime’s attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, he threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.”
Regime spokesmen immediately seized the opportunity to play the victim. One shot back: “At a time when you were still in caves searching for fire, we were inscribing human rights on the Cyrus Cylinder. … Iran is not just a country, it is a civilization.”
The cynicism of that response deserves emphasis. Khomeini disdained Iran’s pre-Islamic past as “Jahiliyyah,” or “age of ignorance.” He taught that “patriotism is paganism,” denouncing love of one’s country as idolatry. The mullahs who have wrapped themselves in Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who allowed captive Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, have spent decades spitting on his memory.
Yet Mr. Trump’s rhetorical imprecision handed the regime a propaganda gift. It also muddied the moral clarity that underlies his campaign. The U.S. military has been targeting the regime and its assets while, to the extent possible, sparing civilians.
However, like their proxies, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s rulers deliberately place military assets near or even in hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure. One example: The girls’ school in southern Iran, believed to have been hit by U.S. bombs on Feb. 28, was adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval compound.
If the regime refuses to back down, then Mr. Trump is likely to target power plants, oil infrastructure, bridges and other economic assets under IRGC control. His aim: to cripple the regime’s ability to sustain the conflict.
Iranian noncombatants will suffer at least as much as the IRGC elite. Many Iranians, perhaps most, are willing to endure such pain if, in the end, they see a chance to lift the mullahs’ boots from their necks. That willingness could erode if Americans do not differentiate between Iran’s oppressed and Iran’s oppressors.
A victory in this conflict would be transformative. The replacement of theocrats with decent leaders would benefit not only the Iranian people but also America’s security partners in the region.
The people of Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen might be able to break Tehran’s Islamist/colonialist yoke. The Beijing-Moscow-Pyongyang axis would lose its Middle Eastern member.
Historians would record, however grudgingly, that Mr. Trump had helped liberate what he has rightly called “the great, proud people of Iran.”
To achieve that outcome will require precision in strategy and tactics, as well as in language. Mr. Trump and all other Americans must stay clear-eyed about who our enemies are.
And who they are not.
• Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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