My family arrived in America from Iraq in December of 1978. Less than a year later, on November 4, 1979 Islamic revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, along with the Americans inside. It felt like we had just barely escaped the Middle East only to be pulled back in. My father strictly warned us not to say we were from Iraq—back then the majority of Americans knew little about the Middle East and he was afraid we would be perceived as somehow connected to Khomeini’s Islamist ideology.
Then in 1980 the Iran-Iraq war began; a war that devastated my family. In Iraq, the Christians had not previously been allowed to serve in the military, but Saddam needed bodies for the war, and that included the Christians. My paternal uncle—the youngest and last of my father’s brothers remaining in Iraq—was conscripted. My grandparents mourned that the last of their sons was sent off to war. Only my aunt remained with them in Baghdad; she took care of them until their deaths, while my uncle was on the front lines.
But the greatest injustice of this ordeal is that when he finally escaped Iraq years later, the American consulate denied his application for asylum because he was a combatant. Like many, he could have lied on his application, but he chose not to. We tried to explain that he would have been killed if he had refused to fight, but the consulate wouldn’t budge. Think of all the people who have lied, deceived, and committed all manner of crimes and were still allowed to enter our country. But my poor uncle, a soft-hearted, kind, honest, intelligent, well-educated Christian man, was denied.
Some argue that the current conflict with Iran is like the U.S.-led Iraq War. It is not. There were problems with that action—in both its motives and goals—which continue to haunt and hinder our actions today. Iraq was a secular dictatorship under Saddam; Iran is a theocracy run by clerics and a morality police. Saddam was a believer in pan-Arabist socialism, which had problems of its own, yet did not come with Iran’s track record of exporting its ideology by funding and directing militias into de facto satellite governments. Saddam’s motivation in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War was countering the export of Iran’s theocratic revolution as it threatened his own power. Saddam had the Islamists within Iraq in check. While Saddam was a brutal dictator and a local bully, he was not on par with the Iranian regime, a regime that has carried out terror attacks against its neighbors and America through its proxies since the beginning. After Saddam’s regime fell, it was Iran-backed militias that killed Americans in Iraq while enflaming sectarian divisions in order to gain a foothold, just as in Lebanon through Hezbollah.
These schemes did not stop with the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. In August of 2024, Nadine Maenza, a long-time advocate for religious freedom in the Middle East, reported on the Iranian-backed militias in the Nineveh Plains. In her report, “10 Years After ISIS Genocide, Christians Are Under Threat,” she writes about the vulnerable Christian villages and the U.S.-sanctioned Rayan al-Kildani, the leader of the Iran-backed Babylon Brigade. Using extortion and bribery, al-Kildani stole Iraqi parliamentary seats reserved for Christians, instead presenting them to Shia Iraqis and thus robbing Christians of their parliamentary vote.
The Christians of the village of Qaraqosh “endure regular harassment,” Maenza writes, “it’s important to note that Kildani is not a rogue player, but working closely with other Iranian-backed militia and political leaders.” His loyalists hold a majority in the Nineveh Provincial Council; his alliance also took over the Kirkuk Provincial Council. Currently, four out of the five Christian quota seats in parliament are controlled by these militias. The ‘don’t rock the boat lest the Iraqi Christian community suffers’ response by some American Christians is a defeatist argument considering what Iraq has already been doing to the Christians.
Even more recently, on June 29, 2025, the Christian Alliance in Iraq issued an urgent appeal asking the international community to intervene for Iraqi Christians against the machinations, harassment, and threat of the Iran-backed militias and politicians to the Christians in Iraq.
Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis are all funded for one purpose: waging war across the Middle East and beyond against any nation in the way of Iran’s apocalyptic Shia Islamic theocratic vision. Saying that the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged war on the world to the best of its ability and reach since 1979 is a statement of fact. Saying that they will continue to do so is not mere speculation. Their well-documented aims for Shia dominance of their muslim neighbors and the world, including destruction of the “Great” and “Little” Satan of the U.S. and Israel, are not statements to be ignored. Iran’s leadership caste views conflict with democratic nations as a prophecy—something that will necessarily come to pass. For a time this threat could be downplayed owing to their incapacity to carry it out, but once Iran possesses nuclear weapons, their chanting “death to America” will be harder to ignore.
In this context, their recent acquisition of intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), which are capable of hitting nearly all of Europe, and their relentless and capable pursuit of both longer-range weapons and weapons-grade uranium make them a truly imminent threat to the world. Iran’s eschatological leadership cult would not make them a state on par with North Korea, which, for all the evil of the Kim dynasty, does not have an apocalyptic vision to immanentize.
There can be honest debate about the application of just war doctrine to this situation, and it is understandable that many are wary of continued American involvement in the Middle East given our history of adventurism. And yet, before declaring absolutely that this war is unjust, the detractors of the American and Israeli attacks on Iran must acknowledge the Islamic Republic’s decades of undeterred, violent, fanatical expansionism. All of this so far is not even considering the plight of Iran’s own people, who, when their voices leak out from their internet blackout, are begging and demanding the removal of the regime.
Total domination cannot abide plurality, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism; and so, through ideological indoctrination and terror, it attempts to organize humanity into one identity. Iran has had an Islamist totalitarian regime for forty-seven years—by nature such a regime cannot be negotiated with. This is evident through years of deceit. It has no intention of acting humanely with its own people, much less the surrounding region or the world.
With all this, yes, I am unashamed to say that I support the actions of America and Israel to destroy the war-making capabilities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and, God willing, the removal of its entire leadership, for the sake of the peoples of Iran, Iraq, the broader Middle East, and the entire world.
