Search parties have now found, in the snow-capped mountains of Iran, the bodies of President Raisi and Tehran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. Their helicopter crashed after returning from Azerbaijan. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has decreed five days of mourning. Some dissidents in Iran were celebrating the prospect of the death of Mr. Raisi, even before the news was confirmed.

Mr. Raisi’s death underscores that the Islamic Republic is past overdue for history’s dustbin. There is no indication that Israel or anyone else was behind the downed aircraft. Yet Iran now faces enemies across the Middle East for its attacks last month and its long support for proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. The full price for October 7 has yet to be paid, and reports are that America stayed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s hand. 

The crash came just hours after reports of America’s foreign policy brass parleying, through intermediaries, with Iran in Oman. President Biden has courted Tehran from the beginning of his term. He has clung to the articles of appeasement first promulgated by President Obama and then exited by President Trump. He has failed to enforce sanctions on the Islamic State, even as the mischief it makes endangers a wider conflict in the world.

Mr. Biden has been briefed on the crash. Separately on Sunday, a short video clip emerged featuring the author Salman Rushdie, who lives and writes under an Iranian fatwa and in 2022, at a Chautauqua meeting in upstate New York,  was mauled by an attacker. The writer lost an eye. Sir Salman tells a German paper, Bild, that “If there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state.”

Mr. Rushdie adds that a Palestinian state “would be a client state of Iran. Is that what the progressive movement of the western left wants to create?” It is what Mr. Biden seems to want, and what he is pressuring Israel to midwife even as Hamas retains its grip over Gaza. Mr. Rushdie calls Hamas a “fascist terrorist group” and notes that its attacks are what began this war. He warns of another “ayatollah-like state” arising adjacent to Israel. 

Mr. Rushdie is acclaimed for his fiction, but here he is a fount of facts. Weakening Tehran, a foe, would strengthen Jerusalem, a friend. Now that Mr. Raisi has gone to his reward, we’d like to think that opportunities could present themselves for helping this theocracy advance down a similar path. It could be an opportunity missed if the Biden administration, like Mr. Raisi’s aircraft, gets lost in the fog of war.

This editorial has been updated from the bulldog.