Trump, Netanyahu doing the free world a favour

US President Donald Trump is being criticised from many quarters for his decision to join Israel in a war to topple the Iranian regime, which Saturday yielded the killing of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

- Bret Stephens

A woman holds pictures of exiled Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and US President Donald Trump in Los Angeles, California, on Feb 28..AFP

The reasons vary.It’s “a betrayal of the American people’ says Elizabeth Warren, who warns that the intervention risks dragging “yet another generation into a forever war" It's a betrayal of MAGA principles, says Marjorie Taylor Greene, who denounced Trump for putting “America last” It's unconstitutional, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, because it’s being conducted without authorisation from Congress. It’s unnecessary, according to writer Andrew Sullivan, who (quoting me, albeit misleadingly) thinks that Iran isn’t much of a threat and the war is being waged for Israel's sake.

And so on. But one country where the United States and Israel are garnering broad support is the same country that’s being bombed.

“Everyone is joyful; itis one of the best days of probably 95% of Iranians’ lives,’ one Iranian resident of the city of Karaj told The Wall Street Journal about Khamenei’s death. “We bolted outside and shouted from the top of our lungs and laughed and danced with our neigh-bours,’ a woman in Tehran named Sara told The New York Times. A doctor who lost his son when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane in 2020 wrote on social media, “We will endure the winter, spring is near” In the city of Shiraz, videos showed people “joined together in a cheer that is typically reserved for weddings, symbolising pure joy”

Itis also true that scores of civilians have been killed, and there was public mourning for Khamenei. But those mourners didn’t have to emerge under the threat of the regime's guns.