A Thought Experiment

Let’s begin with a thought experiment. Wherever you are now reading this — in your home, on a line at Starbucks, sitting on a park bench with your dog– look around carefully. See if you can find the safest possible space. As in “safe” from rockets, suicide bombers, ballistic missiles or the kind of guys on motorcycles who invaded villages in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Seriously.

Now, take out your phone and set your timer for 15 seconds, like an Israeli warning siren. If you were at all able to identify a safe space, can you reach it in 15 seconds? Imagine if you were living on the fifth floor of an old building without an elevator and had to race downstairs and out to a public shelter in a basement several houses away from yours. What if you were in a wheelchair, or you had an infant and a toddler, or 3 or 4 kids, or an elderly parent, or a terrified 40-pound dog?

The terrorist organizations responsible for those rockets and missiles and assaults by people schooled to believe barbarism is a noble form of martyrdom have one thing in common. They have all been trained, financed, and armed by Iran.

In 2015, President Obama introduced the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) an executive agreement between Iran and the five countries of the UN Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France Russian and China) plus Germany. He told the American people it would “permanently prohibit[s] Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon…cut[s] off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb… [and]contain[s] the most comprehensive inspection and verification regime ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.”

Clearly, Iran’s role as the purveyor of human misery had been acknowledged by the world community. If it succeeded as hoped, the JCPOA might even end Iranian terrorism and nuclear threats.

Still, one had to wonder, do terrorist regimes truly respect “executive agreements?”  Would their signatures on a slip of paper deter the same ayatollahs who began their rule in 1979 by storming our embassy and seizing American hostages, followed by the suicide bombing of our Beirut embassy, and bombing our Beirut Marine Barracks, and on and on and on…Could we really believe these same folks wanted to give peace a chance?

In fact, Iran was no less aggressive and no less lethal after signing the JCPOA than it had been previously. It was simply more covert. And what about that “comprehensive inspection and verification regime” that was supposed to provide secure restriction of Iran’s nuclear ambitions? We deluded ourselves. We wanted to believe we were buying time. Perhaps. But we now know that Iran never stopped advancing the development of its nuclear capacities.

I used Chat GPT to investigate Iran’s nuclear status in February 2026. As usual, I asked for Word compatible reference links. I will happily provide them to anyone who asks.  I don’t pretend to understand any of it. What I do understand is this, “Overall, Iran was considered closer than ever to a nuclear weapons capability, though not known to possess an operational weapon.”

I also understand that an enemy with a 47-year history of repeated attacks upon the United States and Israel, with a doomsday clock in Jerusalem Square in Tehran counting down the time remaining until the destruction of the state of Israel must be taken seriously.

Iran was willing to spend much of its wealth on conventional weapons, distributed to its virulent proxies surrounding Israel in Gaza, Lebanon and until very recently, Syria. But it also had bigger dreams and for those, it unleashed the Houthis who not only attacked ships in the Red Sea but also launched drones and missiles against Iranian allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. There is no reason to believe that it has reservations about using nuclear weapons against allies, or enemies, and every reason to believe it is itching to use every capability to achieve world dominance or at the very least, as much human destruction as possible.

The scenario you played out in your imagination at the beginning of this article is the scenario that awaits our children and grandchildren if Iran is not prevented from attaining its nuclear ambitions. We gave peace a chance. Now, we must defeat Iran in war–or teach our children to live like Israelis.