Even if Israel didn’t exist, the United States would need to go to war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. In weekly Iranian rallies, there were repeated calls for “Death to America” and proclaiming America is the “Big Satan.” And there’s been nearly half a century of Iranian hostility and its current drive for nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, suicide drones and financial support and arming of proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis attacking the United States, its allies and interests.

Epic Fury is not a momentary action. It is the culmination of 47 years of war waged by the Iranian regime against the United States, its allies and even its own citizens, having allegedly killed more than 35,000 protesting Iranians last month. We know that Iran was yet again developing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles meant for the United States. Intelligence also revealed that in the next few weeks Iran was moving these weapons programs even deeper into the ground which would have made it virtually impossible to destroy them.  

The U.S.-Israel operation, launched early Feb. 28, struck hundreds of targets across Iran linked to the regime’s instruments of power: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ballistic missile and drone sites, air defenses and key nuclear infrastructure. Iran’s military machine, long used to threaten neighbors and attack Americans, is now under sustained assault.

The campaign has already reshaped the battlefield. Iran’s terrorist religious Islamic fanatic dictator, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the first strike along with nearly 50 of his top deputies. The regime’s command structure is fractured. Across Iran, citizens flood the streets, some cheering the fall of symbols of tyranny, others fleeing as the state responds with ballistic missile, suicide drone and aerial attacks against Israel, U.S. assets and allies. For the first time in decades, the Islamic Republic is significantly weakened but the operation must continue until its grip is broken and a pathway is forged allowing new leaders chosen by the Iranian people. 

The stakes are historic. This is not merely a military campaign but a confrontation between a terrorist Islamist fanatic revolutionary regime and the coalition challenging it.

For decades, Iran has been the world’s leading state sponsor of Islamist terrorism, funding and directing proxies that murder Americans, Israelis and countless others. From Hezbollah to regional militias, these groups act as Tehran’s instruments of violence. This lethal ideology is not rhetoric, it drives the regime’s foreign policy, Islamist terror networks and persistent hostility to the free world. They believe in the literal interpretation of the Koran promoting hostility to non Muslims and non Muslim states. Even Egypt’s president Al Sissi promoted in a speech at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, the leading Islamic university, that there needs to be a “revolution in Islam” that we can’t have the whole world fearing Muslims. 

How we got from 1979 to here

Epic Fury stems from the conflict that began in 1979 when Iranian Islamist terrorists stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for almost a year and a half.  From its earliest days, the regime fused ideology and action, using “Death to America” as a guiding principle for its terror campaigns and hostility toward the free world.

What followed is a decades-long, Iranian-sponsored campaign of terror. In 1983, an Iranian-sponsored suicide bombing destroyed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people including 17 Americans. Months later, an Iranian-sponsored truck bomb killed 241 U.S. Marines at Beirut’s barracks and another Iranian-sponsored bombing targeted the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. In 1984, Iran-linked militants kidnapped and murdered CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut. In 1985, Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah hijackers killed U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. In 1989, Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah abducted and killed U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins in Lebanon. In 1996, an Iranian-sponsored truck bomb destroyed the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel. In 1998, Iranian-sponsored truck bombs exploded outside the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 213 and injuring thousands. And hundreds of Americans were murdered in numerous Iran- sponsored suicide bombings. 

The pattern continued into the 21st century. Iranian-backed fighters launched rocket and drone attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. In 2016, Iranian forces abducted 10 U.S. sailors after claiming their boats entered Iranian waters, holding them overnight before release. In 2019, an Iranian-sponsored rocket attack on Iraq’s K-1 Air Base killed a U.S. contractor and wounded American troops. In 2020, Iran launched three ballistic missile attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, causing traumatic brain injuries. In January 2024, an Iranian-backed militia drone strike killed three U.S. soldiers at Tower 22 near the Jordan-Syria border. In June 2025, Iranian-backed militias launched missile and rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, and days later Iran fired missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, a major American installation.

This is the regime some critics argue should have been negotiated with or left alone. During nuclear talks, Tehran stalled, obstructed and deceived while strengthening nuclear defenses and expanding its ballistic missile arsenal. Domestically, it brutally and mercilessly crushed protests, and revealing a government willing to slaughter its own people to survive. Polls show 81 percent of Iranians oppose the ayatollah and his regime.

For too long, administrations chose delay over confrontation, delivering sanctions relief and financial concessions to a government orchestrating attacks on Americans. That era is over.

Epic Fury aims to protect American lives, dismantle a regime fueling global terrorism for 47 years and prevent it from acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons. It also stands with the Iranian people, including families of tens of thousands recently killed, who have suffered under tyranny since the regime’s violent rise in 1979.

After 47 years of Islamic Iranian aggression, Epic Fury is not just a response to current events, it is a reckoning with history. It is a battle by the US to prevent Iran’s ultimate goal to destroy the US and the West and to establish an Islamic Caliphate and dominate the world.  

Morton A. Klein is a former senior economist for the federal government and serves as national president of the Zionist Organization of America.

© The Leader