As news of the death of AyatollahAli Hosseini Khamenei spread throughout Iran, cries of jubilation filled the streets of Tehran even as bombs were falling.
Videos leaked out showing people chanting "Death to the Regime" from their balconies. Yes, they knew enforcers and informers still littered their streets.
Most of those voices belonged to women, who can – at long last – hope to breathe free, literally and figuratively.
Israel has been dreaming of an overthrow of the Islamic Republic almost as long as the Iranian diaspora has been.
For decades, state and non-state actors enabled by Iran rained terror from the sky, and unleashed mercenaries on the streets, and carried out incursions, including the terrorist attacks on Oct 7, 2023, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
In the days and months following, Israel has been taking out human and operational assets of the regime, both inside and outside of Iran, leading up to Feb 28, 2026, when a joint U.S.-Israeli attack lit up the skies over Tehran in broad daylight.
This writer denounces any claim that the U.S. has no dog in the fight. Ask the 52 held hostage for 444 days, ask families of 241 dead in Beirut Marine barracks and 63 dead in the embassy bombing, ask families of 19 airmen killed in Khobar Towers, ask families of over 600 killed by Iran-backed militias during the Iraq war.
The list goes on. "Death to America" is the regime's raison d'être for their nuclear aspirations. Iran proved amazingly successful in avoiding escalation to a war, always entangling the U.S. with pretenses of negotiations.
Today's war could be avoided if previous U.S. administrations saw through the ruse.
If diaspora experience is any guide, the Iranian people are some of the most ardent believers in the aspirational, even American, dream.
Iranians are some of the most educated people globally.
In a country under the thumb of a clerical rule, women account for half the college-going population, women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) far outnumber the global average.
The Iranian people are hobbled by the iron grip of the regime and its henchmen, police, and morality code enforcers, informers, complicit judiciary, clerics, and the military.
Most of them directly benefit from the sanctions imposed on the country, and therefore, they care little how sanctions affect the common man.
If we depose the Islamic Republic we unlock the promise of a population the size of California, New York, and Florida, combined.
Add that to a peaceful Mideast, and we have more than enough good reasons to engage in the current conflagration.
Iranian designs on the Strait of Hormuz are already starting to take a toll on the global economy. We are energy-independent, and the U.S. economy is mostly services and consumption driven.
Notwithstanding, oil prices are linked to the global available supply, and we are feeling the pinch at the gas station already.
Prices will reflect higher transportation costs for every good even if they originate domestically, or in regions largely unaffected.
No matter how removed a segment of the economy appears to be, operators must reckon with higher disruption risk, even if it is short-termed.
Questions are being asked as to what winning means for the U.S., and what cost.
The world loses if vestiges of the Islamic Republic win by surviving.
Nobody wins, and the Iranian people lose, if post-War Iran devolves into a sectarian hellscape. The American promise of security suffers a body blow if proxies make a comeback in their murderous designs in the Mideast.
The only win-win-win for the region, and for the people of Iran, happens when Islamic Republic is replaced by those who align with the Free World, who are elected in free and fair elections, who give peace a chance in the region, and gives legitimate prosperity a place in the dreams of the common man and woman inside Iran.
No war-time president was held accountable except to the goal of "winning on our terms."
Our coalition of the willing carries hopes of the free and peace-loving people and their aspirations. Particularly for this war, avoidance is not a strategy but an invitation to a disaster in future, discussion and debate are a useful complement to, but not a replacement of, the arsenal of democracy.
The dogma of a diplomacy-first-and-always fails to recognize its expiration date and is tantamount to a doctrine of appeasement-at-any cost.
Paralysis by analysis renders us to the hospice of has-beens.
The United States is a cantankerous democracy.
That cacophony, however, can't drown out bombs when they rain down on our bases and our allies. That confusion may not cloud out dignified transfers as already happening.
Given that so much is at stake in the Mideast today, I would give wide latitude in decision-making to our leaders because not winning is not a choice for us.
Partha Chakraborty, Ph.D., CFA is an economist, a statistician, and a financial analyst by training. Currently he is an entrepreneur in Water technologies, Blockchain and Wealth Management in US and India. Dr. Chakraborty is based in Southern California. Read more Partha Chakraborty's Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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