My family fled the ‘butchers’ in Iran 50 years ago. We can’t give them what they want

On Tuesday, Aug. 25, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Navy has removed or detonated every Iranian mine in the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz. Tankers are moving again, gas prices should finally start to ease and Washington will be tempted to exhale. That would be a mistake. It took the most powerful navy on Earth six months to undo Tehran’s damage to the strait. The 60-day negotiating window produced nothing, Iran's foreign ministry said the deadline "essentially has no relevance," and the regime that just lost this round is already winding the next clock.

I know that clock. My family lived under it before we fled Iran, a Jewish family that watched the revolution turn our homeland into a place where we could no longer safely exist.

Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the rest of the regime leadership are not trying to beat the American military; they are trying to outlast the American taxpayer, and the regime is banking its survival on exactly that.

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A year after Operation Midnight Hammer and the 12-Day War showed the world what American power can do in a matter of days, the American public’s worst fear is materializing anyway: a drawn-out conflict. The strait may be reopening, but the squeeze of the past six months reached pocketbooks nationwide, midterm elections are approaching and Washington is debating how, and how fast, to prosecute this war.

The longer this war runs, the more the Iranian regime gains. The only question that matters is whether America fights the war Tehran designed or the war America can win. Since 1979, the dictatorship has run the same play, which U.S. officials have long described as "deception, defiance and delay." Buy time, bleed the adversary, survive to rebuild. The arithmetic of this war was built for that play. Tehran fields a Shahed suicide drone for about $20,000; America answers with Patriot interceptors at roughly $4 million each. Iran maintains the capacity to manufacture an estimated 10,000 drones a month, has begun rebuilding its missile facilities, and is moving valuable assets underground.

Every truce and every pause becomes a rearmament window for Iran. Tehran is not waiting alone. The regime signed a 20-year strategic partnership with Russia, is receiving more than a thousand tons of missile-making chemicals from China, and collaborates on missile technology with North Korea.

Each arrangement lowers what it costs the ayatollah to keep firing, which means our gravest geopolitical rivals are helping underwrite the missiles aimed at us. The rest of the bill lands on Iran’s neighbors, as the regime strikes airports, shipping and commercial districts across the Gulf states, from Dubai to Doha, to spread the pain and build pressure for American concessions.

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A U.N. fact-finding mission found Iran responsible for the systematic rape and brutalization of women. Iran’s laws make homosexuality punishable by death, and the regime persecutes ethnic and religious minorities as policy. My family was one of those minorities. My mother pulled my brother and me out of Iran because being Jewish there had become dangerous, and she rebuilt our lives in America from nothing.

In January, after a nationwide uprising, the regime reportedly murdered more than 30,000 people, most of them students and young people, in just two days. It has carried out nearly a thousand executions since. Those are my people, Jewish and Muslim alike. I am now a mother of four daughters, and I think about the mothers in Tehran raising girls under a regime that treats their bodies as state property. Every day this regime survives, more of them die waiting for the world to act.

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The violence has never been limited to its own captive citizens. Iran’s proxies killed 241 U.S. service members in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing and at least 603 more in Iraq, by the Pentagon’s own count. The regime has funded anti-Israel protesters inside America, interfered in our elections, and plotted to assassinate American officials, including the president. I have seen that campaign up close.

My daughter was a student at Columbia when the encampments took over campus, and she testified before Congress about what Jewish students were facing. The regime's reach into American institutions is not abstract to my family. For Tehran, delay is not a pause. It is an opportunity to extract more blood and damage America from within.

Some in Washington counsel patience. The blockade is biting, they note, and U.S. intelligence has assessed the regime can withstand roughly 90 to 120 more days. But two things can be true at once. The blockade is hurting the regime and the regime does not care.

The ayatollah will starve his own people, shake down his neighbors and cut back-room deals with Moscow and Beijing before he yields. Meanwhile, every passing day writes another costly line in America’s ledger. A war of attrition is the one war this regime can win, because it built the war that way on purpose.

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That leaves three roads. A long war, which Tehran wins on price. An accommodation, which leaves the regime its missiles, its nuclear ambitions and its proxies, and buys a pause, which they will spend preparing the next round. Or a decisive end to the war on America’s terms.

Simply weakening the regime without ending it just kicks the can down the road. The United States must destroy the regime’s military-industrial capacity, cripple the energy infrastructure that bankrolls the Revolutionary Guard and break its ability to crush the Iranian people who keep rising against it. My family fled the butchers who stole my country nearly five decades ago, and I have spent every year since watching the world try to manage, contain and negotiate with them. The Iranian people are not our enemy; they are the regime’s first hostages. America proved in Operation Midnight Hammer what the most powerful military in human history can do, and it is our job to finish the job.