By Conrad Black

The world is waiting for President Trump to bring the horrible and sanguinary disaster of the last 47 years of terror, oppression, primitive bigotry, and objective failure of the Islamic Republic of Iran to an end.

Iran is the principal terrorism-sponsoring regime of the world; its entire purpose has been to expand the realm of intolerant, extreme, and murderous Islam. It has not been promoting a religion—it has been attempting to enforce by terror, and in the name of religion, murderous totalitarianism. Millions of Iranians have fled, the economy has collapsed, the currency has largely evaporated, and $1 trillion invested in nuclear missiles was vaporized in three minutes by the United States, as its president had promised.

Iran is the continuator of the distinguished Persian civilization of Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great. There have been many gaps in this long history that are not particularly well remembered, but there has never been such a horrible chapter of complete and barbarous failure as this appalling regime of bloodthirsty ayatollahs. The Islamic Republic has posted a large reward for the murder of the president of the United States. It has promised to exterminate the Jewish population of Israel. It doles out blood-curdling threats in all directions. Most of its talented citizens have been murdered or have fled, and it is clear that the overwhelming majority of resident Iranians detest their government and are now risking their lives every day in huge demonstrations to encourage President Trump to follow through on his promise not to tolerate the massacre of the civil population of Iran.

President Trump has earned a reputation for doing what he promises, particularly when military action in response to provocation is involved. Iran is an outlaw state that promotes political disruption almost everywhere in the world, and really only has effective relations with China as an oil customer and Russia as a weapons supplier. It is an ogre and an outcast among nations and has no claim to the protections of a legitimate government, as its population is up in arms against it and it is ostracized by the world.

Given all of these facts, it is little wonder that the whole world is waiting upon Washington. All the ingredients are in place. Iran has promoted endless unlawful terror all over the world and secured the enmity of scores of the world’s governments. It bankrolled the appalling Assad regime in Syria, which murdered large numbers of its countrymen. It financed Hezbollah in Lebanon that effectively took over and largely destroyed that country. It financed the Houthi civil war in Yemen, and from there effectively closed for a time the Red Sea and the Suez Canal by their attacks on international shipping. It has been the greatest single supplier of the Hamas terrorist organization which has conducted a constant and savage war against Israel for decades.

The Islamic Republic is an utterly evil regime, and its elimination would in itself be a giant forward step for stability, human rights, and material progress in the Middle East.

As the Iranian government is now killing innocent citizens in large numbers, it is amply meeting the criterion imposed by President Trump for recourse to what he called “not our boots on the ground, but hitting them very hard where it hurts.” That sort of language from that individual leaves little doubt that precise missile eliminations in the dead of night of all of the barracks of the Revolutionary Guard throughout the country, and the key ministries such as defense, interior, and police would be launched, and that these would severely weaken the Islamic Republic’s ability to terrorize and murder their people. Any such attack would be accompanied by the renewed elimination of Iranian air defenses, and this would permit the continuous intervention of the U.S. Air Force and the Naval Air Force over all parts of Iran, assisting the demonstrators.

If there were any need to go further, the ghost fleet that transports quarantined oil from Iran to China and other places could simply be taken over on the high seas for an indefinite period. A complete air and sea blockade could easily be imposed by the United States on Iran, and there would be neither the means nor the motivation to maintain the ayatollahs’ lifeline overland from Russia or Afghanistan. It would certainly not be done from Iraq.

Certainly, a state of considerable chaos would follow the collapse of the ayatollahs, but an international coalition of good-faith powers could be assembled to provide some sort of oversight, with the cooperation of the apparent reform elements in the restoration of order and of a new constitutional government to resume the long history of Persia. Randomly, a group of countries including India, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, Greece, Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom would be perfectly acceptable and could be relied upon to act responsibly.

This would establish President Trump as rivaled only by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan as the most successful foreign policy president in U.S. history. It would also provide an appropriate update for the intermittent American involvement in Iran. This effectively began with the “lend-lease” shipping of war supplies through Iran to the Soviet Union in 1942.

The following year, all three of the leaders of the Tehran Conference—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—met with the young Shah of Iran, whose exiled son is now the apparent leader of opposition forces. When the erratic left-wing leader Mohammad Mossaddegh nationalized the British-owned petroleum industry and drove the Shah of Iran into exile, Churchill asked for Eisenhower’s assistance, and the CIA rather effortlessly arranged a coup that sent the prime minister packing and brought the Shah back. Although authoritarian, and more secular than the population apparently wished, the Shah achieved immense progress for Iran in every field.

It was shameful when President Carter assisted in pushing out the Shah to make way for Ayatollah Khomeini. President Trump, in doing what he has threatened and has announced is in contemplation, would be redeeming America’s record in the history of its relations with that ancient country. It deserves to be awakened and emancipated from this nightmare.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.