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Trump challenged 50 years of Iran fears — and revealed the rotten, decaying truth

For some 46 years, until 2025, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, self-destructive, nihilistic and inevitably, one day, nuclear.

But was it really ever all that formidable?

The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and subsequently the interim secular socialists.

They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters and transforming the most secular and modern of the Middle East Muslim nations into the most medieval — one that routinely hanged homosexuals, adulterers and almost anyone who questioned the authority of the ayatollahs.

In other words, these were gruesome people, but they didn’t necessarily have a competent military.

The theocracy’s only link with monarchical Iran was that it inherited near limitless oil and natural gas reserves, sophisticated arms and the Shah’s modernized cities.

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It controlled the key strategic chokepoint at the Strait of Hormuz and enjoyed a geostrategically critical location between Asia and the Middle East.

It fueled Iran’s historical chauvinism and pique that the millennia-long historical preeminence of Middle Eastern Persia was not fully appreciated by its Arab neighbors.

So there were lots of natural advantages — for the most part squandered.

Under the camouflage of Shiite puritanism and otherworldliness, the ayatollahs proved even more corrupt (and far more incompetent) than the Shah’s entourage.

Trump has ordered a new way of warfare — and it’s working

They fought a destructive eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s overrated Iraqi dictatorship and showed they were mostly just as militarily incompetent.

Over decades, they killed and wounded thousands of Americans by bombing US embassies, barracks and bases in the Middle East — without directly confronting the........

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