Time To Go After the Head of the Snake

President Trump seems to be inching toward realizing that as long as Iran’s the mullahs are in charge, war will persist. “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” the president writes impatiently on Truth Social. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is orchestrating a campaign with the aim of drying up funds to the ruling Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including freezing bank accounts at the British Virgin Islands and seizing real estate abroad.Time to aim at the head of the snake. Disarming Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraqi militias, and ending the Houthis’ threat to free navigation are necessary tasks. Unless Iran’s proxies are gone, the task of remaking the Middle East is futile. As yet, though, defanging each terror group separately, even as these militias are intent on forever jihad seems like a thankless task. Why not, instead, declare regime change at Tehran as America’s top goal? Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini created the Guard Corps’ Quds force to export the Iranian revolution to the Mideast and beyond. General Qassem Soleimani, killed by an American drone in 2020, was the able architect of turning his proxies into formidable armies. Israeli and American strikes since October 7, 2023, significantly weakened these Iranian cats’ paws: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias. They’re degraded now, but not gone. Washington and others are urging Israel to ease up on military efforts in Lebanon and Gaza. Hamas promises to hand over weapons, even as it reclaims and consolidates its oppressive rule on the strip. Under an American-sponsored pact between Beirut and Jerusalem, the Lebanese army would disarm Hezbollah. The terrorists, though, have no interest in giving up power, at least as long as their Tehran founders and sponsors are intact. Tehran’s propaganda claims that Iran never initiated a war. Since the bombing of the Marine barracks at Beirut in 1983, though, Iranian proxies have wreaked havoc from the Mideast to Buenos Aires. America’s stated war goals, though, are short of ending the engine of that menace. Mr. Trump, loath of comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan, is careful to avoid stating explicitly that the mullahs must go, speaking instead of denying them nuclear arms. Regime change could create the conditions for ridding Iran of atomic weapons. It would also dry up resources that empower the proxies. Mr. Bessent told our Lawrence Kudlow in a Fox Business interview that as a young man in South Carolina he handled poisonous snakes in his home’s backyard. “You’d cut the head off, but the tail kept wiggling,” he said. “You have to bury the head of the snake. We are burying the head of the Iranian snake.”

Time To Go After the Head of the Snake

Time To Go After the Head of the Snake

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