I have spent my adult life opposing the Iranian regime. I do not romanticize it. I do not excuse it. If it were to fall tomorrow, I would not mourn it.
But waking up in Washington today, knowing war has begun, and later hearing that the supreme leader has been killed, did not make me feel victorious. It made me uneasy.
When President Trump said, “For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America,’” I did not hear a slogan. I heard my childhood.
I grew up watching those chants imported from Tehran into my own country. I watched my birth city, Tripoli, shift — from a Mediterranean port city where I, a Muslim, attended Catholic school, to a place reorganized under the shadow of militancy and imported ideology. The 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks was not a distant historical episode to me. It happened not far from my family’s home in Raouche, only meters from the dormitories where I would later live at the American University of Beirut.
After that year, Beirut changed. Israel had invaded. Fatah was defeated. In the vacuum that followed, Hizbullah was born — nurtured, trained, armed, and financed by Iran. Over the next two decades, that proxy grew stronger than the Lebanese state itself. The West knew. Israel knew. The Gulf knew. Everyone adjusted to its rise. And those of us who opposed the militia — in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen — paid the price.
That proxy in Lebanon remains my primary political adversary. Seeing it disarmed and loyal to Lebanon rather than Tehran is a battle I continue to fight. But I also know that disarmament alone is not enough. Ideology and economy run deeper than guns.
So the question is not whether I want to see the regime — and the proxy it built — dismantled. The question is how it is done, so that what follows is not more monstrous than what preceded it.
I agree with President Trump on one thing: the Iranian mullah regime has been catastrophic for the region. But we live in a part of the world where assuming things cannot get worse has always been proven wrong.
History has taught me that when power abandons rules in order to defeat an enemy, the enemy rarely disappears. It metastasizes.
“The hour of your freedom is at hand… Bombs will be dropping everywhere… When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations.”
This is the sentence generations in the region have longed to hear from Washington — the promise that tyranny will fall, that American power will finally align with democratic aspiration.
But the record is too heavy. Too bloody. Too inconsistent.
From Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria, the region learned something difficult: American intervention — or American retreat — did not translate into democratic transformation. Sometimes it produced a vacuum. Sometimes fragmentation. Sometimes abandonment. Always costly disappointment for America’s local allies.
The problem is not that the United States has interests. Every nation does. American voters come first — as they should in a democracy. But that reality has consequences. Again and again, when democracy collided with stability, oil routes, counterterrorism priorities, or geopolitical balance, freedom, accountability, and democratic values became negotiable. Too often, people’s lives became collateral.
One can understand American priorities. What is harder to ask is that those who once depended on U.S. promises suspend their memory.
Trump’s appeal assumes that Iranians can “take over” once the bombs stop. But even experts on Iran — including some within his own administration — are uncertain about the day after. Regimes do not evaporate when airstrikes end. Power reorganizes. Militias adapt. Hardliners consolidate. History has shown that removing a ruler is easier than constructing a state.
The danger is not that Iranians want freedom. They do. The danger is telling them that freedom will arrive riding on missiles.
In Washington today, I heard something different from 2002 — the year I covered the lead-up to Iraq from the newsroom of The Washington Post. Then, Americans argued over intelligence and evidence. Now, many argue over something more fragile: trust.
War — especially one framed as liberation — demands institutional weight. It demands congressional authorization, visible debate, and shared accountability. This decision carried none of that.
There was no vote in Congress. No clear authorization for the use of force. No evident consultation with the Gang of Eight. No articulated plan for what comes after the bombing stops.
That matters because credibility is thinner today. After past declarations of swift success proved less certain, skepticism is no longer ideological. It is structural.
Ultimately, this war is being labeled a U.S.–Israeli attack on the Iranian regime. Yet on both sides of the Atlantic and across the Middle East, many see it less as an institutional decision and more as the convergence of two leaders — Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu — whose political incentives align with escalation.
For Americans, the fear is institutional: What does this mean for constitutional limits and executive power?
For many in the region — including those who despise the Iranian regime — the fear is strategic. Netanyahu is not viewed as a guarantor of peace, and Gaza remains painfully recent.
Different geographies. Different histories.
But the anxiety converges around the same question:
Can this war be trusted? My short answer is the risk is too high.
I do not fear the fall of a regime. I fear a war launched on rhetoric without durable institutional grounding, at a moment when trust — in Washington and in the Middle East alike — is already dangerously thin.
History has shown what happens when power moves faster than credibility.
And my part of the world has already paid for that lesson.
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