A war can be badly argued and still be strategically necessary.

The administration may be fumbling the explanation, but the strategic case for confronting the Islamic Republic—an ideologically driven regime that has spent four decades building the infrastructure of regional war—is far stronger than many Americans realize.

In the late 1970s, when I was an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, the campus was full of protests against the Shah of Iran. Iranian students organized rallies, and American students joined them. The slogans were unmistakable: “Death to the Shah.” I even remember one of the campus communist organizations sponsoring a “Death to the Shah Bake Sale.”

At the time, the Shah was widely viewed as a corrupt authoritarian propped up by the United States. Many people on campus—including people who genuinely cared about human rights—assumed that the revolution gathering in Iran would produce something better.

History had other plans.

The monarchy fell, but what replaced it was not a liberal revolution. It was the Islamic Republic: a theocratic regime that fused clerical authority with revolutionary ideology. The people who marched for freedom in 1979 are still marching for it today, and the regime that emerged from that revolution has spent the past forty-five years defining itself through ideological hostility toward the United States and Israel.

Iranian leaders routinely refer to America as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan,” and the regime has openly declared its ambition to see the Israeli state disappear. In Tehran, a government-sponsored countdown clock once displayed the regime’s prediction of when Israel would cease to exist.

Women were among the many Iranians who protested against the Shah in the late 1970s. What followed, however, was not greater freedom but one of the most restrictive systems of gender control in the modern world. Iranian women have spent the decades since the revolution fighting to reclaim rights that were taken away in its aftermath.

It is one of history’s quieter ironies that a revolution many in the West once cheered has spent the last four decades organizing confrontation with the United States and Israel.

I should acknowledge my own vantage point here. As a liberal American Jew, I do not approach this subject as a detached observer. Israel’s security is not an abstract geopolitical question for many Jews; it is bound up with history, identity, and the memory of how fragile Jewish safety has often been. That perspective does not settle the strategic debate about Iran, but it inevitably shapes how many of us understand the stakes.

Now, nearly half a century later, the United States finds itself at war with that same regime. Yet the strategic case for how we arrived here—and what the endgame might be—has barely been explained to the American public.

Instead, the explanations coming from Washington have felt less like a coherent strategy and more like a bowl of spaghetti thrown against the wall to see what sticks. What began as a tweet and received barely a paragraph in the State of the Union has since been revised and reframed so often that it is difficult to tell whether the administration is explaining a strategy or discovering one in real time.

One day the justification is that Iran posed an imminent threat to American forces. The next day the emphasis shifts to defending Israel. Then the rationale becomes protecting global shipping lanes, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, or restoring American deterrence in........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)