My answers are “I hope so” and “absolutely.”
First “the why.”
A generally accepted “low estimate” of the number of innocent Iranians mowed down in the streets last week is 15,000 dead and tens of thousands more wounded and/or imprisoned. The regime has not yet hung anyone from a crane, but it’s early.
In the worst of all metrics — the murder of civilians as a percentage of population — we have three prior events against which to measure the atrocity committed by the Iranian regime: the Tiananmen Square massacre carried out by the Chinese Communist Party in 1989, al Qaeda’s attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and the invasion of Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2021, which saw 1,200 lives claimed, thousands wounded, and hundreds taken into captivity.
The death toll from the April 15, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre is unknown, but estimates range from 2,000 to 10,000. Even at the high end of the range, that is 0.0009% of China’s population at the time, and so it did not have an enduring and perhaps even revolutionary effect on the country.
Sept. 11 took just under 3,000 innocents from our 281 million people. By contrast, Oct. 7 saw 0.012% of Israel’s population murdered.
Iran’s grisly math from last week is the worst of all. The 15,000 number is 0.016% of Iran’s 92 million people.
It is an unprecedented slaughter of a nation’s people by any terrorists, much less terrorists answering to the ruling regime. The Tiananmen Square massacre has thus been displaced by Iran’s unmatched killing spree when it comes to a government’s own murder of its people in the post-Soviet Union era.
We know why the Iranian regime turned off the internet. This scale of killing has to be done in the dark. What Pol Pot did to the people of Cambodia — a mass killing of millions — went on for over four years and was done out of sight and ranks with the brutalities of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. All those regimes eventually fell, though Mao’s approach to humanity is seeing a revival under Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The death toll from the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of the Uyghurs due to Xi’s orders is unknown. Credible reports detail mass detention of over 1 million, forced sterilization, forced labor, torture, and indoctrination. Experts cite potentially hundreds of thousands or more deaths resulting from these systematic atrocities in Xinjiang.
This, too, was done outside the scope of the world’s vision.
Focused and rapid mass murder in front of the world on the scale of what Iran did last week is without precedent. The world knows. We have seen enough to know from the few leaks that have followed, and more will no doubt surface when Iran reconnects to the globe. What will the world do other than condemn?
Only two nations have the will and the ability to punish Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his henchmen. Israel has strategic reasons to strike Iran because the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program was revealed last year to be an existential threat to the Jewish state, one to rival the now obliterated Iranian nuclear weapons program.
MAGAZINE: ENDING IRAN’S REGIME WON’T BE EASY
President Donald Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer, which did the obliterating. And only Trump can order the American military to punish the Iranian regime in the hope that it curbs any inclination among the ayatollahs to repeat such an atrocity. To establish this guardrail for non-nuclear states seems to be a crucial part of an American president’s job. He leads the U.S. and the West, however one chooses to define the belief in the value of individual lives.
Nobody but Trump knows what he will order done or when he will do so. His senior advisers are an experienced and clear-eyed group. I hope they urge him to lay down a precedent for what will follow such an atrocity, and that he does so when the regime least expects it and in a way that demonstrates to the world the consequences of such a brazen disregard for human life.
