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Hello Reader,
Donald Trump's goals have rarely aligned with those of this newsletter. But when he told Iranians on February 28th that "When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take," he — finally — said the right thing. Whether American actions will match those words is a question we will be watching very closely.
More to come on what's behind the shift next week.
Hope Is Not a Plan
For two decades, Israeli intelligence hacked nearly every traffic camera in Tehran — mapping bodyguards' routes, parking habits, shift rotations — building what intelligence officers call a "pattern of life" on the men who protected the world's most ruthless theocrat.
When the moment came Saturday morning, they quietly jammed the cell towers near Ali Khamenei's Pasteur Street compound, making phones appear busy, cutting off any warning. Blue Sparrow missiles — fired from Israeli F-15s that had been airborne for hours — exited Earth's atmosphere before crashing down. By 9:45 a.m. Tehran time, smoke was rising over the compound. Khamenei, 86, was with his family when they hit.
The world was suddenly a safer place.
Khamenei ordered the massacre of more than 30,000 protesters* in January alone — shot in the street, tortured in detention, disappeared into the system he built. He funded the proxies that killed Americans and terrorized the Middle East for four decades. He accelerated a nuclear program designed to hold the region hostage, defying six UN resolutions along the way. The strikes that killed him, alongside his defense minister, IRGC commander, intelligence chief, and senior advisers, were justified and strategically overdue.
But killing a tyrant is not a strategy. It is an opening move. And right now, the moves that follow it are alarming.
Rubio told Congress this week: "We're not arming the Kurds. But you never know with the Israelis." Kurdish fighters have since moved toward the Iran-Iraq border. The logic, whoever is behind it: tie down IRGC units in the west, stretch the regime's resources, let unarmed Iranians in Tehran and Isfahan take to the streets. It is a seductive theory. It is also not a plan.
Kurds are 10% of Iran's population — Sunni in a majority Shia country, fragmented across competing factions, concentrated far from Tehran. Arming Kurdish separatists risks triggering a nationalist backlash among the Persian majority — the very people whose uprising the strategy supposedly serves. One US official warned the factions "don't have enough military power and could end up as cannon fodder."
The US has armed, used, and abandoned the Kurds in 1975, 1991, 2019, and 2025. The Kurds know this. Expecting them to die for Iranian democracy while Washington reserves the right to walk away is not a strategy.
Israel has struck Tharallah — the IRGC's protest-suppression coordination hub — and Faraja's riot-control headquarters. Those are meaningful blows. But the Basij are still patrolling Iranian streets. The regime still holds a near-monopoly on weapons in most of the country. International Crisis Group's Iran director put it plainly: "If the bet is that airstrikes will finish the job from above while Iranians complete it from below, it's a bet that rests on no clear historical model."
Here is the deeper problem that no one in Washington seems to be addressing: Iran's problem is not Khamenei alone. It is the constitutional architecture that produced him.
The principle of velayat-e faqih — rule of the Islamic jurist — vests absolute authority in a single Supreme Leader who is unelected, unaccountable, and commands the military, judiciary, and state media simultaneously. The Guardian Council, half appointed by the Supreme Leader himself, vetoes every candidate for every election. The Assembly of Experts, theoretically empowered to remove the Supreme Leader, is itself vetted by the Guardian Council — a closed loop designed to make accountability impossible. The president is a figurehead.
Power is funneled upward into one office, one man, consecrated by divine mandate.
Replace Khamenei with his son Mojtaba — the reported frontrunner — or even a moderate theocrat, and that architecture remains intact. Every pathology of the Islamic Republic survives: the theocratic veto, the weaponized judiciary, the revolutionary guards answerable to God and no one else. The fanaticism that produced Khomeini is a system. And systems outlast assassinations.
What Iran needs is not a new supreme leader. It is the abolition of the position itself — replaced by genuine separation of powers, an independent judiciary, civilian control of the military, and elections that are not pre-screened by the people in power. The Enlightenment principles that built the freest societies in history are not Western property. They are available to every people willing to build institutions strong enough to hold.
Iranians have been dying for exactly this — in the streets of Tehran, in Sanandaj, in Isfahan — for years. They do not need Washington to pick their next ruler. They need the IRGC degraded enough that they can pick it themselves.
That is the mission worth completing. But hoping they figure it out is not a strategy.
*The Staggering January Death Toll
The death toll from January's crackdown depends on who is counting and how. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency confirmed 7,015 named deaths — built through individual verification of cross-referenced accounts, locations, and circumstances. That is the gold standard of human rights documentation. It is also explicitly a floor: HRANA listed another 11,744 deaths still under review.
The higher figures use different methods. Iran International obtained classified IRGC Intelligence Organization reports submitted to the Supreme National Security Council showing more than 36,500 dead — internal regime self-incrimination, paradoxically among the most credible evidence available. Time cited two anonymous senior Health Ministry officials describing 30,000 hospital-recorded deaths on January 8th and 9th alone. The Guardian reported that fewer than 10% of deaths may have been officially registered, which would imply the true toll is closer to 70,000+.
Most Western media outlets defer to HRANA's verified list. Methodologically defensible, but the regime cut the internet for three weeks, buried protesters in mass graves, ransomed bodies to families for up to $7,000, and arrested doctors who treated the wounded.
The evidence gap is the regime's own work. Whether the Western media’s reporting reflects methodological discipline or politically motivated minimization is worth questioning.
Counterstrikes
The Tears They Saved
On the morning of February 28, girls aged 7 to 12 were sitting in their Minab classroom when the missiles hit. Some were still under the rubble days later. Their mothers identified them by their backpacks.
As the father of a little girl, I know exactly what those parents lost. Those little girls deserved to grow up. They deserved everything. And the world is right to mourn them.
But Western media outlets have a selective moral outrage problem.
Five days before Minab, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency published "Crimson Winter" — a 1,350-page report naming 236 confirmed minors killed by Iran's security forces during January's protests. Shot in the street. Bullets to the head and chest. Iran's Teachers’ Union separately verified 163 school-age students killed — children whose teachers compiled their deaths from field reports and direct contact with grieving families. Neither dominated front pages.
Then Minab happened, and within hours, the same institutions — CNN, WaPo, the NYT — that spent weeks carefully hedging January's death toll accepted the Iranian government's version of events as the operative narrative. The death toll came entirely from Iranian state media. Foreign journalists had no access to Minab. The regime controlled every piece of information coming out of that city. Yet outlets that spent months treating human rights organizations' January figures as unverifiable ran Iranian government casualty numbers with "unconfirmed" as a footnote rather than a headline.
Same regime. Same internet blackout. Same sourcing limitations. The Iranian government's account was treated as credible when it implicated the U.S. and incredible when it implicated itself.
That is not methodology. That is a choice.
It does not absolve the United States of what happened in Minab. If American or Israeli munitions killed those children — and the investigation must be allowed to find out — accountability is not optional.
But January’s children had names too. They had backpacks. They had mothers. The institutions that couldn't find their urgency then have no standing to claim it now.
Your Warm, Fuzzy, Mass Murdering Uncle
In their obituaries, The New York Times and Washington Post both reached for same thesaurus, describing Ali Khamenei as "avuncular". The man who ordered security forces to open fire on protesters. The man who ran Evin Prison, where guards raped detainees as standard interrogation practice. The man whose government hanged gay men from cranes in public squares.
Among the revelations: Khamenei, like me, is an admirer of 14th Century Persian poet Hafiz. How nice. Hafiz would despise everything he stood for, and his destruction of the culture that produced him.
Ali Khamenei, your patient, warm, generous uncle.
The Times said he "affected" the this quality — technically conceding it was theater — but the choice reveals an instinct the qualifier cannot undo.
The Free Press called this whitewashing, and the charge has force. But the deeper sin isn't the adjective. It's the passive voice applied to his nuclear record. "Those talks were interrupted by the Israeli strikes," the Times wrote. No agent. No history. As if a promising peace process was simply derailed by outside turbulence — rather than the conclusion of two decades of intentional delay while the West paid handsomely for the privilege of being strung along.
Under the JCPOA, the US and its allies unfroze roughly $100 billion in Iranian assets. Obama flew $1.7 billion in cash to Tehran on pallets, saying his "best analysts" believed it would be used for the economy. Biden released another $6 billion in a 2023 prisoner swap. Iran used every dollar and every year to sow chaos and advance nuclear capability.
To properly memorialize Khamenei, skip the Western press. Listen to Iranians.
Arizona Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, the first Iranian American in Congress, said simply: "Khamenei was the epitome of evil. For decades, he oversaw the torture, imprisonment, and murder of countless Iranians who dared to demand freedom."
End of story.
Kaine's List
The obituary writers had journalistic conventions as partial cover. Tim Kaine — the Democratic Senator from Virginia and Hillary Clinton's 2016 running mate — has none.
Last week, Kaine used the Opinion page of the WSJ to forward a simple premise: before judging Iran, count America's sins first.
I have condemned the 1953 coup in these pages. It was wrong. But Kaine's framing ignores a rather inconvenient fact: Khomeini himself called Mossadegh a "rabid secularist" who "deserved to be slapped by Islam." Khomeini's clerical mentor, Ayatollah Kashani, helped organize the very coup crowds that ousted him. The regime that wields 1953 as its eternal grievance was founded by a man who wanted Mossadegh gone. Handing the Islamic Republic a permanent, inexhaustible trump card — every act of Iranian terrorism traceable to a CIA operation from 73 years ago — ensures accountability always belongs to someone else.
The method collapses further on contact with his own list. He includes Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut — 241 Americans killed. Those Marines were on a peacekeeping mission. Kaine's logic requires that Iran can massacre sleeping American soldiers because the US was trying to prevent a war Iran was actively fueling. That isn't context. That is moral equivalence.
Worth noting: Kaine co-authored the Iran Nuclear Review Act, giving him a personal legislative stake in the JCPOA being remembered as a deal that worked. It didn't. His op-ed is as much self-justification as conscience.
Chuck Schumer captured the whole pose in a single Senate floor speech: "I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei" — then, in the same breath — "Iran must never be allowed to attain a nuclear weapon, but the American people do not want another endless and costly war." A monster who couldn't have nukes, but the only action that could have stopped him was wrong.
You can hold both positions simultaneously — as long as you never have to choose.
Kaine's war powers argument is constitutionally serious — Rand Paul has made it regardless of which party holds the White House, and that consistency earns respect. Kaine has earned none here.
Coming March 27th: Paid Subscriptions
A reminder that paid subscriptions are coming on March 27th. Friday deep-dives will move behind a paywall. Pricing info coming next week.
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