What if this works out?

Over the weekend, people were suddenly thrown into the proverbial shock zone where they would have to answer this question in the future: “Where were you when you heard the Ayatollah and his top Iranian leaders had been taken out by U.S. and Israeli forces?”

One friend with a long history of public service in politics and various tours in Republican White Houses calmly replied, “I was on the front porch eating steamed dumplings.”

If his dumplings wind up being the only things that got steamed on Feb. 28, then it will truly be one of the greatest miracles of this age or any time in the conflict between the Persian world and the nation of Israel and Western civilization.

But at the same time the news got out about the attack and the confirmed deaths of the Ayatollah and his top leadership team, many people were no doubt scurrying to their Old Testament to read and reread the books of Isaiah, Daniel and Nehemiah to try to divine if this was the fulfillment of thousands of years of prophecy and we are indeed headed into the end times.

Any military attack or act of war is a serious matter and can never be taken lightly. But when it involves historic enemies in the Middle East such as the Islamist regime in Iran and the Jews in Israel, it takes on a degree of importance and magnitude unlike any regional conflict or dispute over territorial boundaries.

There is understandable concern about the ability of the United States and allied nations to contain the scope and ferocity of this conflict simply because, once initiated, wars and military engagements take on a life and inertia of their own and only get extinguished by the ultimate demise of one side or the other.

But the question must be asked despite all the consternation now involved: “What if this works?”

The question for the rest of the world becomes, “Would the world be safer and more prosperous if there were no radical extreme Islamist leaders in control of Iran?” For the past half-century after the Shah (king) of Iran was overthrown and replaced by the Muslim clerics, Iran has been at the center of the training and export of radical militant terrorism the world over. They have been able to use the billions earned by the sale of the oil deposits under Iran to fund such terrorist behavior, not the least of which resulted in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia.

Repeated attempts by successive American presidents and administrations to hold Iranian leaders to the terms of any treaty or agreement have failed, and the world has never had an Iranian leadership team since 1980 they could be confident would become a trusted participant in the shared goals of peace and mutual prosperity in commerce around the globe.

But what if this preemptive strike works? For more than a decade, the Iranian people have been willing to rise in protest against the oppressive dictatorial rule of the Ayatollah and his henchmen. News reports said close to 20,000 Iranian citizens, many of them women, were murdered in cold blood by the Iranian military under orders from the Ayatollah.

Now that there is a vacuum of leadership at the top caused by these U.S./Israeli attacks, will the people of Iran rise and storm the capital in Tehran and follow the lead of the brave citizens of the former Soviet Union and eastern European bloc countries in 1991 to overthrow communist leaders and establish democracies such as in Estonia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland?

Each citizen of those former Soviet Union enclaves and Eastern European countries faced the same sort of potential violent repression by remnants of the communist regime who wanted to maintain the same vicious status quo as before. However, they pushed through to gain control of their freedom and new republics — much the same as the freedom-loving Iranians can possibly achieve right now in the aftermath of this attack.

Instead of being fearful of what might happen in the Middle East after these attacks, perhaps we should all be prayerful and hopeful that a new generation of peace-loving Iranian leaders will be in place to take over the leadership of a once proud culture and heritage. Try to imagine what a nonterrorist-exporting Iran would look and be like on the world stage. It draws an immediate comparison to what would not have happened to Europe had Hitler not been allowed to take over Germany in 1934.