Over the past few days, I have found myself caught in a struggle – between what I know to be true as an analyst, as a student of the ideologies that have shaped and deformed the Middle East, and what I feel as a simple civilian, a partner, just another human being living through yet another war.
As an analyst, I know how the Islamic Republic’s theology of martyrdom and conquest makes war inevitable. I know that the words of its rulers are not political theater. I know that the missiles falling on our cities are not accidents of history but the fruit of ideological clarity on the part of those who send them.
And yet, knowing this does not make the sirens easier to bear. It does not ease the sting of watching someone you love flinch at the sound of a blast. It does not quiet the heart when you look at the woman beside you and wonder whether you will both make it through the night.
And so, I sit with this contradiction: the part of me that understands why this war is necessary, and the part that aches at the cost. The part that knows this is the price of survival, and the part that grieves that survival should demand such a price. This is the cruel truth of the Middle East. The Western mind often imagines war as a failure of diplomacy. But in the Middle East, war is often the price of diplomacy that betrayed reality. The war between Israel and the Islamic Republic was never optional. It was only delayed – delayed by illusions, by the commerce of appeasement, by those who treated the genocidal intent of Iran’s rulers as a bargaining chip rather than as the heart of the matter. And so, the innocent suffer because the guilty were tolerated for too long.
War with Iran and the price paid by ordinary people
For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran – a state that does not merely possess an ideology but is itself the instrument of one – has been given the space to plot, the wealth to fund terror, and the technology to sharpen the blade of its ambitions. Western diplomats, addicted to the rituals of managerial negotiation, mistook engagement for compliance. Intellectuals, blinded by post-colonial dogma, dismissed the regime’s rhetoric as justified. Activists, those modern apostles of inverted justice, treated the Islamic Republic as a victim of Western imperialism, not as an empire in its own right.
Israel’s preemptive strike against the regime in Tehran signals, perhaps for the first time in many years, a recognition that waiting is no longer a luxury. The decision was not made out of adventurism but out of necessity. On June 12, 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors formally declared Iran in breach of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations – its first censure in 20 years. In response, Iran announced plans to open another enrichment facility, upgrade centrifuges, and sharply expand its uranium production.
The international system, for decades, made a calculated choice to tolerate the intolerable. The Islamic Republic armed Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets – each aimed at Israeli civilians. It funded Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis. It worked to encircle Israel with a ring of fire. And all the while, Western governments and institutions insisted that engagement would moderate the regime, that incentives would transform its ambitions, that treaties would tame its theocratic fervor.
The Islamic Republic’s ideology is not a posture to be moderated by treaties or softened by diplomacy. It is a theology that fuses the utopian delusions of modern totalitarianism with the revolutionary zeal of jihad. It is, quite literally, the belief that the world must be bathed in chaos so that divine order may be restored.
Anyone who thinks a nuclear Iran – an Iran governed by men who sanctify martyrdom and dream of apocalypse – is a positive for this world is either catastrophically ignorant or an accomplice to disaster. This is not a regime seeking security or balance of power. It is a regime that sees death as a gateway, not a deterrent. To imagine that such a force, armed with the most destructive weapons humanity has ever created, will act with restraint is to surrender reason itself. And in that surrender, what you invite is not peace but suicide.
There will still be those who speak of proportionality, of restraint, of diplomacy. Let them. Let them speak in their conferences and their columns. We will listen – because we must always listen – but we will also remember: No column has ever quieted a siren. No speech has ever stopped a missile in flight.
We will remember this because for us the price is paid not by theories but by people. The price is measured in sirens that wail through the night. It is measured in the mad scramble to shelters, in skies lit by the unnatural glow of war, in the silence that follows an explosion – a silence filled with dread as you stare at your screen, waiting to learn which street, which home, which life has been erased.
At the center of this great and terrible clash you will find ordinary people. You will find mothers in nightgowns carrying their babies down stairwells, their hearts pounding louder than the sirens. You will find fathers who stand guard at the door of the shelter, trying to look braver than they feel, so their children will believe in safety. You will find old men and women sitting on plastic chairs in the glow of emergency lights, remembering other wars, other nights, other sirens from years gone by.
The missiles fall, and the headlines speak of strategy, of retaliation, of deterrence. But beneath the headlines, there is the quiet, stubborn pulse of human life – the cup of tea left unfinished on the kitchen table when the siren sounded, the dog that trembles at the feet of its owner, the drawings on the fridge that no one had time to admire that day, the home you may not return to. This is the true front line – not on the maps of military planners, nor on the whiskey-brimmed lips of those “sealing the deal,” but in the small and precious spaces that war threatens to erase.■