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I fled Iran’s terror — Trump’s courage is an answer to my prayers

The strikes President Donald Trump launched against Iran Saturday are not just military operations — they are the answer to decades of prayers by Iranians who have suffered under tyranny.

And they represent the first time an American president has truly come to the rescue of the Iranian people.

I was born and raised in Iran, where my family lived under the grip of an authoritarian theocracy.

Growing up in the 1980s, my classrooms were filled with anti-Western indoctrination and “Death to America” chants.

Yet to most of us, America was a symbol of justice and freedom from fear.

In those same classrooms, we passed around forbidden tapes of Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses and Red Hot Chili Peppers, letting us experience a taste of the joy and liberty possible in America.

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After my family fled the regime’s persecution targeting those of our Jewish and Baha’i faith, America gave us something we had never had: freedom.

When I told my parents I wanted to join the US Air Force, they didn’t hesitate; my serving the country that gave our family refuge was, to them, the most meaningful way we could honor it.

That same conviction later led me to the US Treasury, where I served for nine years, designing and implementing the sanctions that held the Iranian regime accountable for its terrorism, ballistic-missile program, and systematic brutalization of its own people.

Yet after the 2015 nuclear deal, I was charged with dismantling those same sanctions in the hope that the regime could be reasoned with.  

How do you build a lasting peace with a regime that sent 12-year-olds to help Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad gas his own citizens? 

A regime that has never and will never represent or protect its own people?

Every US president since Jimmy Carter has sat across the table from Iran and bought what they were selling.

Trump is the first one who didn’t.

When Barack Obama blinked on Syria in 2013, after Assad crossed Obama’s red line on chemical weapons, the world learned American threats were negotiable.

When Obama handed Iran the nuclear deal formally known as JCPOA, with its sanctions relief, billions in unfrozen assets and a sunset clause, the regime learned America would reward it for promises it never planned to keep.

Saturday, the regime learned that era is over.

Trump sees the Iranian regime for what it is, a destabilizing force that has plotted assassinations of American officials, including Trump himself — and he acted.

That takes courage. It takes historic vision.

For the first time, an American president has come to the rescue of the Iranian people, rather than focusing only on the nuclear file.

When the strikes began early Saturday, I heard from friends and relatives, some of them in Iran.

They were celebrating — particularly by reports that the Supreme Leader himself had been killed — and cautiously hopeful.

But every one of them said the same thing: Their deepest fear is that these strikes will stop short.

That they will wound the regime just enough to bring it back to the table, but leave it intact, still capable of crushing dissent, still able to imprison, torture, and execute the young Iranians who dare to dream of something better.

The Iranian people do not want a weakened theocracy.

They want a free Iran, one whose government answers to the nation’s interests, not to a revolutionary ideology exported on the backs of suffering civilians across the region.

If these strikes are designed to achieve that end, history will remember them as a turning point.

If they are designed merely to extract concessions, if the regime survives and regroups, the Iranian people will pay the price.

The courage it took to begin this must be matched by the vision to see it through.

Miad Maleki is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.  

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