Confronting the Iranian regime is way overdue. How we got here, briefly. Across decades, U.S. appeasement encouraged Iran's Islamic totalitarian regime. It should have been prime target after 9/11. 1/ The 9/11 Commission reviewed 2.5M pages, interviewed 1,000+ officials — and still missed the fundamental question: who is the enemy? 2/ The answer: Islamic totalitarianism — a movement seeking global rule under sharia, with the Islamic Republic of Iran chief backer, financier, and model. 3/ CARTER (1979): Iranian militants storm the U.S. embassy. Guards are ordered not to fire — to avoid angering the mob. 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days, subjected to mock executions and psychological torture. 4/ Carter's response: recruit the PLO as a go-between, offer diplomatic "carrots," rule out military force. The final deal gave Iran $7B in unfrozen funds and zero accountability. Khomeini's lesson: "America cannot do a damn thing." 5/ REAGAN (1983): Iran-backed Hezbollah bombs the U.S. Embassy in Beirut — 63 dead. Six months later, a truck bomb destroys the Marine barracks — 241 servicemen murdered. Iran's fingerprints were all over both attacks. 6/ Reagan's response: fire some inconsequential shells at Syrian forces, then quietly pull the Marines out. He called it a "redeployment." Islamists called it a retreat. Bin Laden later cited Beirut as proof that America wouldn't fight. 7/ Meanwhile, Reagan was secretly arming Iran with missiles — hoping Tehran would help free American hostages in Lebanon. America was actively strengthening its own attacker. 8/ BUSH (1989): Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie and his publishers — a public death decree targeting free speech in the West. Bush's response: imply that Rushdie and Khomeini were equally objectionable, then go quiet. 9/ The result: Rushdie's translators were stabbed and murdered. U.S. bookstores were firebombed. The FBI logged 70+ threats in a single month. Washington did nothing. Khomeini had effectively imposed sharia on American soil — and faced no consequences. 10/ CLINTON (1993–2000): The first WTC bombing (treated as a crime), the Khobar Towers bombing (19 Americans killed — Clinton stonewalled the Iran investigation to protect diplomatic outreach), the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (hundreds dead). 11/ Clinton's "retaliation" for the embassy bombings: 70 cruise missiles fired at empty training camps and a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that turned out not to be a weapons site. Iran, which helped train the bombers, was untouched. 12/ Then the USS Cole: a suicide boat blows a 40x40-foot hole in a U.S. warship, killing 17 sailors. Neither Clinton nor his successor bothered to respond. 13/ The pattern across all four administrations: each attack handled in isolation, the enemy never named, aggression never punished. The "realist" foreign policy framework treated every crisis as a one-off — connecting the dots was considered naive. 14/ Post-9/11, G.W. BUSH evaded the nature of the threat, targeting Iran and Afghanistan, missions subverted by irrational moral ideas. More: new-ideal.aynrand.org/p/ari-… cc @yaronbrook @AynRandInst