Iran Says It’s Set to Manufacture Weapons in Other Countries — and Really, Enough Is Enough

The defense minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Aziz Nasirzadeh, made the momentous announcement on Saturday. The Islamic Republic, he said, according to the Times of Israel, “has established an infrastructure to manufacture weapons in ‘several countries.’” He didn’t name the countries, leaving open the possibility that none of this may be true at all. Nevertheless, Nasirzadeh’s statement underscored the fact that despite the American and Israeli devastation of its nuclear and ballistic missile facilities in June, the Islamic Republic of Iran is determined to resume its rogue activities on behalf of the global jihad as soon as it possibly can. This is yet another indication of how much regime change is needed there.

At the time of the Israeli and American strikes on the Islamic Republic, there was a great deal of hysteria about how terrible it would be if Iran’s Islamic regime were toppled as a result of those strikes, or in their aftermath. Overnight, “regime change” became the new COVID, a plague to be feared, hated, and avoided at all costs, and some previously respectable analysts of the contemporary scene even went so far as to opine that regime change always brought chaos and destruction in its wake.

This was taking the lessons of America’s foredoomed misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan quite a bit too far. After all, if regime change is always evil and to be avoided, should the U.S. have done its utmost to ensure that the National Socialists remained in power after World War II? Some would say yes, but that only indicates how much our public discourse today has taken a bizarre turn into some dangerous territory. In saner quarters, it should still be recognized that regime change is sometimes just the opposite of a catastrophe, and is not synonymous with America getting involved in endless and pointless wars. The Islamic Republic of Iran is one such case.

To say that Iran is ripe for regime change is not to say that any foreign troops should enter it. The Iranian people widely hate the Islamic Republic, with a disgust so deep that it has led many of them to turn against Islam itself: in June 2020, a research organization, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN), conducted an anonymous online survey on religious views in Iran after forty years of Islamic rule. Nearly 40,000 Iranians participated.

The survey organizers reported that while Iran is officially over 99% Muslim, only 40% of the Iranians who participated in this anonymous survey said that they were Muslim. After forty years of strict Islamic rule, Iranians were so far from thinking that it was the solution for society’s ills that massive numbers of them didn’t identify as Muslim at all.

Meanwhile, several times over the last few years, Iranians in massive numbers have risked imprisonment and torture by chanting the praises of Reza Shah, the shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941 and father of the shah whom Jimmy Carter betrayed and abandoned. This is just one among a number of indications that the biggest fear of those who warn against regime change, that it will lead to anarchy and civil war, are overlooking or ignoring the fact that Iran has someone who can immediately step into the power vacuum that the mullahs will create when the Islamic Republic finally keeps its appointment with the dustbin of history: the son of the deposed shah, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin observed Wednesday, “of all Iranian diaspora leaders, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted shah, has the greatest legitimacy. He has name recognition, and even those Iranians who supported the 1979 Islamic Revolution look upon the monarchy as the golden age before sanctions, war, and corruption hobbled the country.”

Even better, the crown prince has indicated that he is ready not to take power as a new autocrat, but to lead a caretaker government until the Iranian people choose the government they prefer. While he has rivals who also wish to lead a post-Islamic Republic Iran, his openness to being only a temporary leader until the Iranians determine the direction of their nation leaves the door open for everyone in a way that other contenders do not. And Reza Pahlavi is also the only would-be Iranian leader who has the stature and the name recognition to unite the various factions of the embattled and largely clandestine Iranian opposition.

Maybe the decision to stop short in June and leave the Islamic Republic in place was not the best one. At this point, one hopes that the Trump administration is exploring all possible avenues to aid the crown prince and others who want to see an end to the Islamic Republic, as the Iranian people, much as they detest the regime, are suffering too comprehensively from its tyranny for an effective opposition to emerge within the country.

Those people have suffered under the Islamic Republic for 46 years. It’s much more than enough. Before the Islamic Republic makes good on its boast of having weapons production centers in other countries, the nations of what used to be known as the free world ought to be helping the Iranian people make the final push to topple this evil regime.

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