For 47 Years the West Tried Diplomacy – While Iran’s  Mullahs Wanted Armageddon

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Iran has been at war with the United States and Israel for 47 years now. We didn’t start it; they did. But we are finally getting around to finishing it.

In the first week of the 2026 action, we demolished over 3000 major targets in Iran, largely succeeding at the goal of decapitating the mullahs’ regime and eliminating their military capacity. Our airstrikes are rapidly wiping out their launch sites, their arms factories, their air force and naval vessels, while making a valiant effort to do all this without causing innocent civilian casualties.

(As in any war, there are going to be some civilian casualties no matter how hard one tries to avoid it, but it is commendable how hard Israel and the USA are trying to contain their targets to the clear and overt elements of the mullahs’ regime).

Within a week, Iran’s ability to wage war was almost entirely degraded. They could shoot rockets, but they couldn’t really aim them; they could explode bombs but they couldn’t really deliver them. They could threaten, but they couldn’t really follow through.

So how did the ruling mullahs – those of whom are still alive – respond, in light of this new reality?

They spent the week firing missiles anywhere they could, regardless of the merit of the target, even regardless of whether the target was an opponent or an ally. As the Iranian mullahs’ regime was rendered more and more toothless, they just fired anywhere, even at countries that had desperately tried to stay neutral, even been friendly to them, for decades. The Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, even Qatar, took incoming fire from Iran. Why?

A rational government, having been rendered militarily impotent in a week, would sue for peace, hoping to get away with their lives as they relinquish control of a nation no longer theirs to rule.

Instead, the remaining mullahs keep on trash-talking the Western world as if they were the nuclear power they have always aspired to be, and they announced a new ruler, son of the old ruler, just as committed to the Shi’ite theocratic tyranny that they have forced on the poor people of Iran for 47 years.

To say they haven’t learned their lesson is putting it mildly.

But perhaps what’s more important is that we understand why they have these positions, since these positions are not going to change.

We Americans don’t normally think of the religious views of a foreign adversary nation; We don’t tend to assume that it matters much whether another country is Catholic or Protestant, Buddhist or Hindu. Perhaps we should, but we rarely do.

When facing an admitted theocracy, however, we simply must consider their religion. We have no choice.

Like many religions, there are many types of muslims. There are those who take it very seriously; there are those who don’t. There are those who don’t really believe in it but who pretend to because it’s expected.

There are those who are muslim in public, but are in fact secret Christians, Zoroastrians, Bahais, Hindus, Jews, and atheists, in the privacy of their homes.

And then there are the ones we would call moderate muslims, a huge sector with a thousand meanings, one which too often really means they would never engage in jihad themselves, but they happily fund and hide others who do.

And it is very difficult – almost impossible – for outsiders to tell which is which.

Then there is the most famous distinction, the one that the mainstream press always leads with: the general split between Sunni and Shia.

The Shi’ite muslims in Iran – the mullahs who have ruled for 47 years – are Twelvers, and are believers in what we would call the most extreme branch of Mahdism, the apocalyptic expectation of the return of a twelve-century-old descendant of Mohammed who will someday take over the world.

They aren’t alone in expecting an apocalypse; lots of religions, both mono and poly theistic, have expected an apocalypse someday. The difference is, with Iranian Twelvers, they believe it is their religious duty to do everything they can to bring about that apocalypse.

Unlike most other believers in an eventual Day of Judgment, from the ancient Norsemen to modern Christians, the Shia feel personally called to work as hard as they can to rush it along.

This helps explain their commitments to terrorism, to mass murder, to all sorts of excessive evil; they believe that the more violent upheaval there is on earth, the more quickly the Mahdi will return.

And it explains their insistence on developing nuclear bombs. Unlike the Russians and Americans, the British and French, and most other nations with nuclear weapons, who have them as deterrents and pray that they’ll never be used – the Shia theocrats running Iran do want to use them. They desperately want the ability to kill as many of their enemies as possible, as quickly as possible. It’s part of their particular brand of theology. And that’s why we in the West have tried so hard to keep Tehran from ever getting such weapons – because we don’t think they’d be an eventual threat; we believe they would be an immediate threat. If possible, the mullahs would likely have used such weapons before the West even realized they had them.

And this understanding also explains the mullahs’ actions during the first week of the war:

An outsider would expect the mullahs to face the reality that they are soon to be deposed, but instead, they defiantly keep on appointing new placeholders to fill the roles that the coalition has made vacant. They will not willingly give up control of Iran because they care more about their goal of bringing about the apocalypse than they care about their own health and safety.

Nothing else could explain Iran launching missiles at Bahrain, the U.A.E., Kuwait, and even Qatar. At a time when our Western analysis would expect them to try to get their fellow muslim countries to rally around one of their own, they instead fired indiscriminately at their own muslim neighbors. Why?

Because the concepts of peace, alliance, fellowship and honor have no place in the context of a desperate cultish acolyte’s effort to rush the arrival of the end times.

When we wonder why the old ayatollahs, the current ayatollahs, and the future ayatollahs, are all behaving so strangely, we must remember their real goal.

Once we understand that this crowd of apocalyptic zealots is never going to change their views, we can understand two things:

That it was right to finally start the process of trying to eject them from power, however expensive this project may be, and

That it will be equally necessary to work with the eventual replacement government to build safeguards into their new secular constitution, ensuring the prevention of such authoritarian Shi’ite fanatics gaining political power ever again.

Because when we started reading the news, it looked like it was the mullahs who were stubbornly refusing to acknowledge reality – the reality of the western alliance’s dominance, the reality of the mullahs’ defeat.

But the unavoidable conclusion is the discovery that it’s really the West that has been refusing to acknowledge reality, for some 47 years now, in our vain hope that the mullahs could eventually be negotiated with, could be rendered peaceful, cordial, cooperative, like normal people elsewhere across the world.

The actual reality is that the apocalyptic Shia/Twelver mullahs of Iran – and their adherents – must never be entrusted with power in any way, ever again, because they will use it to bring about death and destruction wherever they can.

Iran was a peaceful, rapidly modernizing, Western-facing nation once, under the Pahlavis.

And it can be again.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo