At long last, like a decades-long grumbling appendix, the radical Islamic mullahcracy which has ruled and ruined Iran for slightly longer than my daughter has been alive, is being suitably and righteously dealt with.

By the Israeli’s, and not the US, but I’ll take what satisfaction I can get and be grateful. Business is being settled at long last and after more than 40 years. The running sore of the middle east, the funder, inspiration and director for so much terrorism against the non-Islamic world is being debrided and sanitized. I honestly wonder why that has taken so long, knowing full well of the specific animus that the mullahs of Iran had against both Israel and the US. I guess that we all had other fish to fry, metaphorically speaking, over the last four decades; settling the hash of the ayatollahs just wasn’t at the top of our ‘to-do’ list. As a member of the military and most often stationed overseas, I had plenty of reason for Iran-sponsored/funded terrorism to be on my mind, after the violent takeover of the us embassy in Teheran, and the holding hostage of embassy staff, as well as Americans who just happened to be in the wrong place on that day.

Invading a country’s embassy is on the same level as invading the country itself, and technically, we would have been well within our rights if we declared war right then and there. But of course, Jimmy Carter – on whose thick, sanctimonious, Jew-hating head responsibility for the hostage debacle landed – hemmed and hawed, whimped and simped his way through the remainder of his term as president. It has since been considered likely that Carter bears a large portion of the blame for the shah’s overthrow.

Some time ago, there was a discussion on the blogger Diplomad’s place, where a number of long-time Department of State veterans were reminiscing on this topic. One who had been around in the late 1970s recollected that the sudden official animus against the shah’s works and all his ways came up out of nowhere. This was much to the commenter’s surprise, and when he asked ‘why’ was told that it came from the very top. The general consensus among State Department veterans on that particular thread was that Carter pulled the rug out from under the shah at the bidding of Saudi Arabia; Carter’s good buddies with a vested interest in hamstringing a regional rival, especially a relatively tolerant and secular one. (Personal note – I was doing basic training at Lackland AFB during the time when the Air Force was also training Saudi and Iranian personnel, and I carried on a brief and very chaste flirtation with an Iranian tech school student. He was sweet and gentlemanly and poetical, and told me several times that the Iranian students looked down on the Saudis as being ignorant and uncouth country bumpkins. Hardly civilized at all, compared to proud and worldly Persians. Having had a couple of less than pleasant encounters with the Saudi students, my fellow female trainees and I agreed.)

The supposition of the Diplomad’s fellow diplomatic veterans seemed pretty logical and I have the impression that “Blame Carter!” has percolated around the conservative side of the blogosphere for a while. If we had a national news media worthy of any respect, or even just academic historians of contemporary international relations who are not ashamed to cast shade on a prominent Democrat Party figure, they might have investigated the possibility and brought the hard evidence out then or since.

Oh, perhaps all the woes of the Middle East since the overthrow of the Shah can’t be blamed on Carter’s fat and sanctimonious head. Native progressives and communists did their part, as did the religious autocrats themselves, each party thinking to use the other towards their own ends. It just turned out that the Islam-addled mullahs were more organized, and had a wide, if not particularly deep pool of popularity among the rural elements. Or so I had read at the time. One does read reports lately that the Iranian mullahcracy has become increasingly corrupt, incompetent and resoundingly hated; that Iranian women are unhappy and protesting having to live under the restrictions of an Islamic version of The Handmaid’s Tale, that Iranians generally are rebelling against Islam various social cruelties and reverting to pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism, or even Christianity. I watched a recent video purporting to be of a currently popular outdoor sport in Iran – that of running up behind Islamic clerics and knocking off their turbans. The overthrow of the mullahcracy has been confidently predicted with increasing frequency – but has never managed to happen. With the surgical amputation of the whip hand by Israel (and perhaps quiet assistance from us) though – chances are better for an Iranian revolt against the power of the mullahs.

The main thing to keep in mind now, is that when the bombs and missiles stop falling and the drones return to their base, Iran’s future will – rightfully – be in the hands of the Iranians; both those in-country and those of the Iranian exile diaspora. Their problems are theirs to fix. Comment as you wish.