The Iran war critics who make the news – the politicians and pundits who say the conflict was a mistake in the first place – are having a field day.
The Islamist regime has not only survived; it has retained formidable offensive capacity. The regime still possesses a significant portion of its ballistic missile arsenal and hundreds of mobile missile launchers. Even worse, many underground launch facilities are intact. The nuclear program has not been fully eliminated, and the fate of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium is unknown. Iran’s Lebanese Shiite proxy, the foreign terrorist organization Hezbollah, has been degraded but not destroyed, while the Houthis of Yemen are battered but functional.
If the purpose of war is to defeat the enemy, the argument goes, this war failed – and the United States and Israel should never have started it.
The argument has it precisely backwards. The capacity that Iran has retained isn’t evidence that the war was the wrong choice. Iran’s ability to still seriously threaten American assets and allies is evidence that the war came too late – not by months, but by decades.
The missile stockpiles, underground fortifications, and proxy networks that stretch from Beirut to Sanaa were built across 47 years, through eight American presidencies, by a regime that understood, with cold clarity, that the U.S. would always find a reason not to act.
The bill presented to the American and Israeli militaries in this conflict is the accumulated invoice of four-and-a-half decades of appeasement. Every President from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden contributed to it. The surprise isn’t that the tab was so large. The surprise is that anyone expected a different result.
To understand how Iran became the military power it was when this war began, one must go back to the revolution itself – and to the American response to it. In February 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran from exile in Paris and established a theocratic republic explicitly dedicated, in its founding documents and in its public theology, to the destruction of the American and Israeli orders in the Middle East.
In the runup to the revolution, Carter, who as recently as the New Year’s Eve before the revolution, had toasted Iran’s Shah in Tehran as a “great leader” presiding over an “island of stability,” tried to win over Khomeini by betraying and abandoning the pro-American, modernizing monarch. Carter signaled to the revolutionaries that the Shah was done. His overthrow was treated as both an inevitable political transition and an opportunity to exploit political Islam against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, even went so far as to predict that Iran’s new ruler, Khomeini, a medieval religious fanatic consumed with hatred for the West, would eventually be hailed as a “saint.”
Months earlier, other observers (including this author, writing on the front page of the New York Jewish Week newspaper) had warned that if the Shah was allowed to fall, America – and Israel – would face an implacable enemy for years to come.
The warnings were ignored.
When Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days, Carter’s response established the template for the next four decades. Diplomatic protests were issued. Limited sanctions were imposed.
When military action was finally attempted (Operation Eagle Claw in April 1980) it ended in a catastrophe of logistical and mechanical failure in the Iranian desert, killing eight American servicemen and leaving the wreckage of U.S. helicopters as trophies for the revolutionary state. Iran drew the lesson that America could be humiliated with impunity.
The Islamic Republic has spent the decades since demonstrating, again and again, that this lesson was correct.
During the Iran-Iraq War that began in September 1980, Iran began acquiring its first ballistic missiles from Libya and Syria – crude weapons, but a foundation. The program that would eventually produce 3,500 ballistic missiles aimed at Israel and U.S. bases across the region had its origins in the Carter years, nourished by American passivity.
Ronald Reagan came to office with tough rhetoric about U.S. power, Soviet expansionism and the threat of revolutionary radicalism, and his administration presided over the departure of American hostages from Tehran on the day of his inauguration.
But the Iranian regime was not intimidated.
The 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American servicemen in what was at the time the deadliest attack on American military personnel since Vietnam, was carried out by Hezbollah with Iranian direction and financing.
The Reagan administration’s response was to run away.
The decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Lebanon reinforced, powerfully, the lesson Iran had drawn from the hostage crisis. During this same period, Iran was acquiring Scud-B and Scud-C missiles from North Korea and initiating its first domestic drone development programs: unmanned aerial vehicles that were primitive by the standards of what would come, but genuine steps toward achieving domestic military aerospace capability.
The foundation was being laid, and U.S. policy was providing both the inaction and, in the Iran-Contra episode, the actual weaponry to help lay it.
On March 16, 1984, CIA Beirut Station Chief William Francis Buckley was kidnapped by Hezbollah operatives acting under Iranian direction. Intelligence captured during the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran helped identify him as one of the CIA’s most valuable officers in the region.
Buckley was tortured for months and eventually transferred to Iran, where he was subjected to more torture. His ordeal became one of the most damaging intelligence compromises of the Cold War, and helped produce one of the greatest failures of American statecraft.
After taking Buckley, Hezbollah systematically seized Western civilians and officials off the streets of Beirut over a period of several years. Eventually, some 30 Westerners were taken, among them, seven Americans, including journalist Terry Anderson, Presbyterian minister Benjamin Weir, and hospital administrator David Jacobsen.
Unlike the 1979 Tehran hostages, who were held by the Iranian state directly and released together in January 1981, the Beirut hostages were held by Iran’s proxy in a chaotic civil war environment, making rescue extremely difficult.
Though Hezbollah held the hostages physically, Iran controlled the leash. The Reagan administration – publicly committed to the position that it would never negotiate with terrorists – privately concluded that only Tehran could secure releases.
This created a paradox. To get the hostages back, the U.S. needed to give Iran something it desperately wanted. Iran was in the middle of a grinding, attritional war with Iraq and was running critically short of American-made weaponry left over from the Shah’s era, particularly TOW anti-tank missiles and HAWK surface-to-air missiles.
In 1985, National Security Council staffer Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and later John Poindexter developed a covert channel to Iranian intermediaries – principally, an arms dealer – to trade weapons for hostages.
At the administration’s request, Israel served as the initial middleman, shipping U.S.-supplied missiles to Iran that were then replenished by the U.S. In August and September 1985, Israel transferred 504 TOW missiles to Iran in two shipments.
One hostage, Reverend Weir, was released.
Subsequent shipments continued through 1986, with the U.S. eventually dealing directly with Iran rather than through Israel.
North devised a scheme to mark up the price of the weapons sold to Iran and divert the surplus profits to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, who were fighting the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. Congress had explicitly banned U.S. government funding of the Contras. The diversion thus linked two separate covert policies into a single potentially criminal enterprise: the Iran arms sales and the Contra support.
When a Lebanese magazine exposed the arms sales in November 1986, the entire architecture collapsed. Reagan initially denied it, then acknowledged the arms transfers but insisted they were not a ransom. The subsequent Tower Commission, appointed by Reagan, and the joint Congressional investigations that followed revealed the full picture.
The hostage rationale for Iran-Contra ultimately failed on its own terms. Despite multiple arms shipments worth tens of millions of dollars, the Beirut hostages were not freed en masse. Hezbollah simply took new hostages as fast as old ones were released, keeping the pressure on.
And Buckley, the hostage whose kidnapping had first driven Reagan toward the Iranian channel, had been dead since June 1985, a fact the Iranians concealed throughout the negotiations to maintain their leverage. His remains were not recovered until December 1991, when his body was found on a Beirut roadside.
Terry Anderson, the last American hostage, wasn’t released until then, long after the scandal had run its course.
George Herbert Walker Bush entered the White House in January 1989 with a phrase that became, in retrospect, an almost perfect encapsulation of the strategic naivety that characterized much of U.S. Iran policy.
“Goodwill begets goodwill,” Bush said in his inaugural address, signaling an openness to improved relations with Tehran conditional on Iranian cooperation in securing the release of American hostages still held in Lebanon.
The phrase became an epitaph for decades of wishful thinking about a terrorist-sponsoring state that had shown no interest in genuine accommodation on any issue that mattered.
In 1990, the Bush administration returned $200 million of frozen Iranian assets as part of a partial settlement of claims arising from the revolution – a reward offered to a regime that had in the preceding years directed terrorist bombings, assassinations, and proxy warfare against American interests across three continents.
Iran’s missile inventory at this point stood at approximately 200 Scud-class weapons. It would not remain there for long. During the 1990s, North Korean technicians worked in Iran to help its scientists master Scud production. North Korea also supplied Iran with the medium-range Nodong missile, which Iran renamed the Shahab-3, along with maintenance infrastructure, training, and production blueprints.
The Bush years saw no serious military or intelligence effort to interdict the North Korean arms pipeline, to constrain Hezbollah’s growing arsenal, or to address the underlying ideological and strategic threat that Iran represented. The administration was consumed by the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which, whatever its other merits, had the effect of eliminating Iran’s most significant regional military rival at American expense – a strategic gift Tehran was not slow to exploit.
Bill Clinton’s two terms are often characterized, in the Iran context, as a period of relative toughness because of the 1995 executive order imposing a total trade and investment embargo on Iran, followed by the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996. These were real measures, and they imposed genuine economic costs on the Iranian regime. But the economic pressure, unaccompanied by any credible military posture or systematic effort to address Iran’s military programs, did nothing to slow the pace of weapons development and acquisition.
The Clinton years saw Iran dramatically accelerate its ballistic missile program. With North Korean assistance, the Shahab-3 was fully developed into a weapon with a range of approximately 1,300 kilometers, sufficient to reach Tel Aviv from Iranian territory. U.S. intelligence tracked the North Korean arms and technology transfers but no serious effort was made to disrupt them.
In June 1996, a massive truck bomb killed 19 American airmen at the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. U.S. investigators developed strong evidence of Iranian involvement through the Saudi Hezbollah network it had cultivated and directed. The Clinton administration’s response was to defer to Saudi preferences for quiet diplomacy rather than pursue accountability in any form that might have imposed costs on Iran.
By the end of Clinton’s presidency, Iran possessed approximately 650 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah’s arsenal in Lebanon had grown substantially throughout the decade, with Iranian weapons flowing through Syria with minimal interdiction. The economic sanctions, for all their real costs to the Iranian economy, had not slowed a single weapons program in any meaningful way.
George W. Bush entered office and delivered, in his January 2002 State of the Union address, what is still the most accurate public characterization of the Iranian regime’s strategic significance ever delivered by an American President. He said Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, formed an “Axis of Evil” – states that combined mass-casualty weapons programs with demonstrated willingness to support terrorism against America and its allies.
The speech identified the threat. But the administration blundered. Its invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had the direct effect of removing from the map the one regional military power capable of checking Iranian expansion without U.S. involvement. Iraq under Hussein, for all its genuine crimes, had fought Iran to a bloody standstill during the eight-year war of the 1980s. With Iraq eliminated as a strategic counterweight, Iran found itself able to project influence into a neighboring state with a Shiite majority population and a devastated security apparatus.
Iranian-backed Shiite militias became major power brokers in post-invasion Iraq, killing American soldiers with sophisticated, roadside explosive devices supplied by the IRGC’s Quds Force. The weapons were specifically engineered to defeat U.S. armored vehicles.
The Bush administration, its military bogged down in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was in no position to confront Iran directly, and so it didn’t try.
During the same years, Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment facility was under construction beneath 80 to 90 meters of solid limestone near Qom – a facility so hardened it was designed from inception to survive conventional attack. It wasn’t publicly disclosed until 2009.
Iran’s ballistic missile inventory grew from approximately 700 to over 1,200 weapons during the Bush years. The Shahab-3 was joined by the Ghadr-1 and early variants of the Sejjil solid-fuel missile, which offered faster launch times and substantially greater survivability than liquid-fueled predecessors.
No serious effort was made to interdict Iranian weapons transfers to Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, a 34-day conflict with Israel in which Hezbollah fired some 4,000 rockets and missiles at the Jewish State.
Then came the Obama years, which produced the most consequential buildup of Iran’s military power in the regime’s history. By 2013, North Korea was assisting Iran’s development of an 80-ton rocket booster – the core component of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) platform.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, finalized in July 2015, was presented by its administration architects as a pragmatic achievement that blocked the most dangerous near-term path to an Iranian nuclear weapon. What it actually accomplished was to provide the Islamist regime with approximately $100 billion in previously frozen assets and sanctions relief, to legitimize its nuclear program as a permanent feature of the regional landscape, and to do nothing whatsoever about Iran’s ballistic missile program, its support for terrorist proxies, or the massive underground fortification effort that had been underway for years.
The JCPOA contained no restrictions on missile development, no requirements regarding Hezbollah or the Houthis, and sunset clauses that allowed UN restrictions on missile-related transfers to expire in October 2023 – a date that, in retrospect, looks less like a diplomatic oversight than a scheduled enablement.
The $1.7 billion in foreign currency cash delivered to Iran in January 2016 – structured to circumvent Congressional notification requirements – was the most literal expression of the philosophy underlying Obama-era Iran policy: that Iran could be converted from adversary to stakeholder through sufficient financial accommodation.
The concrete military consequences of this period were awful. In October 2015, Iran publicly revealed the existence of an underground missile launch complex buried 500 meters beneath the surface, only one of what Iranian commanders described as hundreds of such facilities throughout the country.
Iran had more than 1,000 ballistic missiles as the Obama administration concluded. The regime’s underground infrastructure was substantially complete, and the proxy networks were fully operational.
By the time Obama left office, Hezbollah possessed an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles of varying sophistication – 10 times the size of its arsenal at the beginning of the 2006 war with Israel – including precision-guided munitions capable of hitting specific military targets in Israel. The Houthi movement in Yemen, which seized the Yemeni capital Sanaa in September 2014 with Iranian support, was armed with ballistic missiles capable of reaching Riyadh and, later, with drones and anti-ship weapons that would threaten Red Sea navigation.
Iran deliberately flooded Hezbollah with cheap, mass-produced rockets precisely because quantity is the point. Iran’s strategy is to overwhelm Israeli air defenses through sheer volume. Iran’s own ballistic missile program, by contrast, was built for strategic deterrence and deep strikes – hitting Israel proper, U.S. bases in the Gulf, or Saudi infrastructure with missiles capable of carrying large warheads over long distances.
Iran was simultaneously running two parallel strategies: a mass rocket saturation force through proxies, and a sovereign strategic missile force for state-level deterrence. The 1,000-plus ballistic missiles estimate for Iran and the 150,000 rocket figure for Hezbollah reflect entirely different weapons categories serving different doctrinal purposes.
Donald Trump’s first term brought genuine strategic disruption to this picture. The 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA and reimposition of maximum pressure sanctions imposed real economic costs on Iran and constrained some of its available resources. The January 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani, the IRGC Quds Force commander who had personally directed the proxy strategy for more than two decades, was a blow to operational continuity that Iranian commanders acknowledged, however reluctantly.
By January 2020, however, the infrastructure Soleimani had spent his career building was already built. The underground missile cities existed. The Hezbollah arsenal existed. The Houthi force existed. The hardened Fordow facility existed. Killing the architect didn’t demolish the building.
By the end of Trump’s first term, Iran’s ballistic missile inventory had grown to approximately 2,900 weapons, because sanctions, whatever their economic effects, didn’t halt missile production at facilities already constructed, staffed, and supplied through supply chains developed over decades.
The Biden years contributed the final increments to the problem. The administration’s attempt to renegotiate the JCPOA and pattern of relaxed sanctions enforcement during the negotiating period provided the Iranian regime with financial breathing room.
Beginning in 2022, Iran began exporting Shahed-136 loitering munitions (suicide drones that circle and wait until diving autonomously or under direction to strike their targets) to Russia for use in Ukraine. The transaction generated hard currency for Iran, provided it with performance combat data on the weapons, and demonstrated to the world that it had become a major military exporter capable of sustaining a peer-level military conflict with precision-strike munitions. The same Shahed-136 variants would later be used against Israeli and American targets.
When the war began this year, Iran possessed over 3,500 ballistic and cruise missiles, hundreds of hardened underground launch sites of varying depths, a drone arsenal of genuine sophistication, a Hezbollah force armed at levels that would have been considered a significant national military in any previous era, and Houthi forces capable of sustained attacks on commercial shipping in one of the world’s most critical maritime corridors.
This wasn’t a threat that had emerged from nowhere. It was the predictable and predicted result of 47 years of decisions – and deliberate non-decisions.
Consider the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the largest conventional bunker-busting bomb in the U.S. arsenal. Certain Iranian facilities were built specifically to challenge or exceed the weapon’s penetration capability. Yet the U.S. treated the GBU-57 as a niche item rather than a strategic requirement. As late as 2015, only 20 had been procured. When Operation Midnight Hammer finally occurred a decade later, 14 were expended in a single night.
The deeper lesson isn’t about any particular weapon. It’s about priorities. The U.S. produced at peacetime rates while Iran fortified at wartime pace. A threat that U.S. planners had tracked for decades was met with procurement measured in dozens rather than hundreds.
The U.S. spends roughly $1 trillion annually on defense and national security. The inability to field sufficient quantities of the only munition specifically designed for this mission wasn’t a budgetary failure. It was a failure of strategic focus.
The argument made by critics of the preemptive strikes – that the war was wrong because Iran retained too much destructive capacity – is therefore precisely the argument that justifies the conflict. An adversary that retained, after significant military degradation, a menacing ballistic missile force and an underground infrastructure impenetrable to conventional attack wasn’t an adversary that could have been safely left alone. The question was never whether to deal with this threat but when.
Imagine what another decade of inaction would have produced.
Multiple intelligence sources, Iranian opposition groups, and think tanks have reported that Iranian officials attended several North Korean nuclear tests, reportedly paying millions of dollars for the privilege. Attendance reportedly gave Iranian officials specific technical device design and yield, the size and configuration of the plutonium core, triggering mechanisms, and warhead material composition. Separately, intelligence provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated North Korea also transferred mathematical formulas and computer codes for warhead design, and in 2011 provided Iran with nuclear explosion simulation software.
Iran has made no secret of its ambitions to develop ICBMs. Paired with nuclear warheads, Iranian ICBM capability would transform the strategic landscape in ways that make Iran’s current harassment of the Strait of Hormuz look trivial by comparison. A regime willing to close the world’s most critical oil chokepoint to extract concessions would, with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, be in a position to extract concessions from any nation on earth, including the U.S.
This isn’t speculation about Iranian intentions. The regime has stated its intentions plainly and consistently since 1979. Committed to an expansionist theology that views conflict not merely as a path to power, but as a form of spiritual purification, Iran’s declared near-term objectives are the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the U.S. from the Middle East.
The regime’s long-term objective – crazy as this may seem – is global transformation.
Iran’s ideological framework is apocalyptic. The Islamic Republic’s foundational theology holds that sufficient chaos and conflict will hasten the return of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, and the ultimate destiny of humanity. The Mahdi’s return is the regime’s transcendent obligation.
Khomeini himself made the aim clear.
“We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah,” he said. “For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”
It’s true that the 2026 war has been costly. War against an adversary given decades to prepare is always costly. The casualties, the economic disruption, the regional instability – all of that is real, and none of it should be minimized.
But the costs could not have been avoided by not fighting; they could only have been deferred, with compounding interest, to a later confrontation in which Iran possessed not 3,500 missiles but 5,000, not hundreds of underground launch sites but a thousand, not a Hezbollah armed with precision missiles but a Hezbollah armed with something considerably worse.
The appropriate question is whether the costs could have been reduced by fighting earlier; and the answer to that question is unambiguous. The time to attack Iran’s missile program was when it was 200 Scud-class weapons and no underground facilities. That moment was 1990. Every year of delay thereafter increased the price of the eventual reckoning.
History won’t record that the decision to preemptively attack Iran was premature. History may well record that it was overdue by generations. That Carter invited the contempt that built the Iranian missile and nuclear programs, that Reagan armed the regime directly, that Bush Sr. rewarded its aggression, that Clinton watched the Shahab-3 roll off the assembly line and did nothing to stop it, that Bush Jr. gave Iran the strategic gift of a destabilized Iraq, that Obama handed Iran $100 billion and a decade of digging, that Biden watched Iranian weapons enter combat service in Ukraine and did nothing to stop it.
In short, the strikes on Iran weren’t early. They were late.
But, as the saying goes, better late than never.