Israel has every right to strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. The Islamic Republic has spent decades arming proxies, threatening annihilation, and racing toward a nuclear weapon. No serious person disputes that these threats are real, or that Israel is entitled to defend itself against them with overwhelming force. What I dispute is the fairy tale that has been draped over Operation Epic Fury like a flag over a coffin: the idea that this massive, multi-province bombing campaign is secretly a liberation project, and that the average Iranian is waiting in grateful anticipation for the rubble to settle so she can finally be free.

This morning, as strikes hit 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces, Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people directly, invoking the “Woman, Life, Freedom” chant and urging Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, and Ahwazis to “throw off the yoke of tyranny.” President Trump told the nation to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.” Beautiful sentiments. Stirring rhetoric. And almost certainly disconnected from anything resembling the actual desires of the ninety million people living under those bombs.

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Here is a truth that the regime-change chorus in Jerusalem and Washington does not want to hear: the average Iranian is not a dissident. The average Iranian wants a functioning economy, a predictable government, law enforcement that keeps order, and someone to deliver the mail. This is not because Iranians love the mullahs. Plenty despise them. It is because revolutions are catastrophically expensive, and Iranians know this better than almost anyone on earth. A 2024 University of Maryland survey found that if the United States attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, four in five Iranians would want to rebuild them, and three in five would want to expand the nuclear program. Bombing does not produce gratitude. It produces nationalism. Every serious pollster who has studied Iranian public opinion has found the same dynamic: foreign military pressure rallies the population around the flag, even a flag many of them would privately prefer to burn.

Yes, there is a disaffected secular elite in Tehran and a handful of other cities that genuinely yearns for a liberal, westward-facing Iran. Their courage, demonstrated in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022 and again in the January 2026 uprising, is real and admirable. Their numbers, relative to the country’s vast rural and conservative population, are small. The distance between their social media posts and the political center of gravity in a deeply religious, Shia-majority nation is enormous. To mistake the sentiments of the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles for the mood of the country is not analysis. It is projection, pretty much like the projections of the Philhellenes of Europe during the Greek War of Independence. In the nineteenth century, Western romantics projected the glory of classical Athens onto modern Greece, envisioning a nation of marble-white philosophers yearning for liberation. They were disappointed to find a complex, multilingual society influenced by Ottoman rule, which bore little resemblance to the Parthenon of their imagination.

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And about that Iranian diaspora. It must be comforting, from the safety of Santa Monica or Westwood or suburban Toronto, to cheer every strike as a step toward the Iran you remember or imagine. These members of the diaspora are armed with foreign passports and a safe distance of several thousand miles. They will not huddle in darkened apartments when the air defense sirens sound. They will not queue for hours at gas stations as fuel runs short, as Iranians in Tehran already were this morning, scrambling for bread, eggs, and bottled water that had vanished from store shelves. And when border restrictions tighten, as they always do thanks to the very Western nations whose flags these expatriates now wave, the Iranians trapped inside Iran will have no way to escape. The ICRC confirmed today that families across Iran are already fleeing for safety, their livelihoods shattered, homes damaged. The IFRC has allocated emergency funds for 200,000 people in immediate humanitarian need. The operation is hours old.

Then there is the women’s liberation narrative, which may be the most morally grotesque element of this entire enterprise. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has invoked Mahsa Amini’s name repeatedly since 2024, framing Israeli strikes as a path to freeing Iranian women from the mandatory hijab. During the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, an Israeli female flight technician reportedly wrote “In memory of Mahsa Amini” on munitions loaded onto fighter jets.

Hoping for political glory, U.S. President Donald Trump jumped on the regime change in Iran bandwagon.  The Foundation for Defense of Democracies published a paper explicitly titled “Using Human Rights as a Weapon Against Iran.” Western activists and some of their Israeli counterparts have talked endlessly about freeing women from hijabs. Let us sit with what that means in practice. This morning, according to Iran’s state news agency IRNA, a strike hit a girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab, reportedly killing at least 53 students, a number that the Judiciary of Minab later raised to 85, with Iran’s Foreign Ministry suggesting the toll could climb to 160 as rescuers dig through rubble.

A separate strike on a sports hall in Lamard killed more than 15. These are the girls whose freedom we are supposedly securing. I am struggling to understand how being buried under the concrete of your own classroom constitutes liberation from the hijab. UNICEF’s Executive Director responded today by noting that strikes have killed and injured children and created “widespread fear and trauma.” The ICRC President reminded all belligerents that civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, homes, and schools must be spared, and that upholding the rules of war is an obligation, not a choice.

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The Iranian women whose liberation is supposedly being delivered by cruise missile have been remarkably clear about what they think of this. Nobel Peace Laureate Narges Mohammadi, writing from inside an Iranian prison in June 2025, called for an immediate ceasefire, declaring that democracy and peace will never emerge from the corridors of war and violence. Nasrin Sotoudeh, the celebrated human rights lawyer in Tehran, told Ms. Magazine this month: “You can’t bomb a country into democracy.” Four imprisoned women activists smuggled out a statement during the June war declaring that their liberation was “only possible through the struggle of the masses, not by clinging to foreign powers.” Even Masih Alinejad, arguably the most hawkish voice in the Iranian diaspora and one who had previously welcomed the idea of strikes on nuclear sites, reversed her position when bombs actually fell in June, demanding that Netanyahu stop killing the Iranians fighting for their freedom. The women of Iran do not want to be saved by F-35s. They have said so, loudly and repeatedly, from prison cells and living rooms and exile. The question is whether anyone claiming to act on their behalf is listening.

I understand the appeal of the liberation narrative for Israelis and Americans. After years of existential threat, grief, and moral scrutiny from abroad, it is profoundly reassuring to hear that this campaign serves a higher purpose, that the strikes raining down on Iranian cities are a gift to the Iranian people. Senator Lindsey Graham, the ever-gleeful chicken hawk, certainly thinks so, blessing the operation on social media. Israeli ministers have donned “Make Iran Great Again” hats. This story flatters everyone who tells it. It transforms an act of war into an act of charity. That is precisely why it deserves scrutiny.

Because the record of liberation-by-bombardment is not ambiguous. It is a record of unmitigated catastrophe. In Iraq, the promise was that beneath Saddam lay a liberal democracy waiting to bloom. The Brown University Costs of War Project has documented over 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed by direct violence, with total excess deaths reaching into the hundreds of thousands. What emerged was not democracy but sectarian civil war and the Islamic State. In Libya, NATO intervened under the banner of “Responsibility to Protect.” Human Rights Watch documented civilian casualties including women and children in strike after strike, and what followed Gaddafi’s fall was a failed state with open-air slave markets and two competing governments. Women, who under Gaddafi had comprised more than half of university students and enjoyed equal-pay protections since 1970, watched those rights erode as extremist factions gained control. In Afghanistan, Laura Bush told the American public that the war was “a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Twenty years, over 46,000 dead Afghan civilians, and a 330% increase in airstrike deaths later, the Taliban returned to power and the UN declared two decades of progress for women erased. In every single case, the women whose liberation was invoked to justify the bombing ended up worse off than before.

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A responsible Israeli and American policy toward Iran would take these lessons seriously. Strike the nuclear facilities. Degrade the missile capacity. Eliminate the immediate threat. And leave. That is the sober, defensible use of military force that Israel’s security situation demands. What Operation Epic Fury appears to be doing, with 200 fighter jets striking 500 targets across almost the entire country, with explicit regime change as the stated goal of both Trump and Netanyahu, is something far more ambitious and far more dangerous. Because absent a full-scale military occupation lasting years or decades, there is no way to guarantee that regime change will produce the regime you want. You can shatter a state. You cannot dictate what emerges from the wreckage.

This is where Israeli and American commentators should pay close attention to Iranian history, because Iranians have already run this experiment. In 1979, a broad coalition of liberals, leftists, nationalists, students, and intellectuals united to overthrow the tyrant Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. They were not naive people. Many genuinely believed they were building a freer, more democratic country. The Tudeh Party believed it. Mehdi Bazargan’s provisional government believed it. The secular nationalists of the National Front believed it. Within months, the revolution was devoured by its most organized and ruthless faction. The liberals were purged. The leftists were imprisoned and executed. The democratic Iran they had fought for became a theocratic state. The secret police changed names. The prisons stayed full. This is the history that actual Iranians carry in their bones. It is why so many of them, even those who despise the mullahs, greet talk of regime change with dread rather than excitement.

The most likely outcome of this particular misadventure is not the liberal Iran that Western commentators fantasize about. It is an Iran in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gains even more control. The IRGC is the most entrenched, most heavily armed, and most ideologically cohesive institution in the country. A scenario in which the existing civilian-clerical leadership is weakened or discredited does not produce a flowering of secular democracy. It produces an IRGC that steps forward, blames the former leadership for being too restrained, too diplomatic, too soft, and claims the mandate to never permit such weakness again. This is the internal logic of every militarized state that has come under external attack. The hawks do not lose influence when the bombs fall. They gain it. The Atlantic Council’s expert panel raised exactly this concern today, warning that these operations risk empowering the most extreme factions within the Iranian security establishment.

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And then there is Reza Pahlavi, the pretender to the Iranian throne, whom certain Washington think tanks have been grooming as the future of Iran through lavishly funded conferences and media appearances, backed by millions in dark money from groups linked to Leonard Leo and conservative donor networks. What delusion is this? Here is the son of the very tyrant whose brutality and corruption made the 1979 revolution inevitable, sitting comfortably in exile, calling for foreign powers to bomb his own country, apparently expecting that the survivors will welcome him home. His family name is synonymous with SAVAK, with torture, with the crushing of dissent. His primary contribution to the current crisis has been to encourage, from the safety of the Potomac, the destruction of a nation he has not lived in for nearly half a century. Do the people promoting him as Iran’s future genuinely believe that Iranians will accept the son of a former tyrant as their leader? A man who would rather see his country destroyed and then rule the ashes than accept that its people might choose a future that does not include him on a throne? No. This is not a political program. It is a vanity project subsidized by desperate hawks looking for a friendly face to put on regime change.

I write this as someone who wants Israel to be safe, as someone who wrote an article calling for Israel to occupy Gaza, even though it was a risky position to hold. I write this as someone who recognizes the Islamic Republic as a genuine threat to Israel, to its own people, to the region. The question is not whether the threat is real. The question is whether a maximalist bombing campaign designed to topple the regime will actually make Israel safer, or whether it will generate the kind of chaos, nationalist backlash, and power vacuum that has followed every single attempt at regime change from the air in the modern era. The internet inside Iran is down to four percent of normal capacity. The people we claim to be liberating cannot even call their families to find out if they are alive.

The Iranian people deserve better than the regime that governs them. On that, everyone agrees. They also deserve better than being reduced to extras in someone else’s liberation narrative, characters in a story that makes Israelis feel noble, Americans feel purposeful, and diaspora Iranians feel connected to a homeland they left behind. If we genuinely care about the people of Iran, we should start by acknowledging what they themselves are telling us. Iranian civil society, from Nobel laureates to imprisoned feminists, has said no to this war.

Respecting their voices means striking the targets that threaten Israeli survival and then stopping, rather than chasing a maximalist fantasy that history has refuted again and again and again, and that Donald Trump touts.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)