Iran: Complete Regime Change for Permanent Peace

by Con Coughlin  •  Gatestone Institute  •  April 21, 2026

The enduring barbarity of the clerical regime’s attempts to subjugate the Iranian people to its will demonstrates why the Trump administration’s decision to launch fresh military action was justified.  Picutured: Public hanging in Iran. Photo by Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0, Wikipedia

• The enduring barbarity of the clerical regime’s attempts to subjugate the Iranian people to its will demonstrates why the Trump administration’s decision to launch fresh military action was justified.

• It also exposes the moral bankruptcy of the opponents — both left and right wing — of Trump’s military intervention who fail to grasp how ordinary Iranians are suffering at the hands of Iran’s brutal clerical dictatorship.
• Operation Epic Fury has certainly dealt the ayatollahs a devastating blow, one that might still enable the oppressed Iranian people to achieve their ultimate objective of regime change in Tehran, but only if the US administration does not foolishly exchange a ruthless religious tyranny for a ruthless military one.
• If both Iran’s ruthless Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the former Shah’s army — now strictly supervised by the IRGC and downgraded to border control — have guns while the citizens of Iran, held hostage by their own government, do not, the regime’s ferocity and disregard for due process will undoubtedly continue.
• Trump’s promise to the Iranian people that “Help is on its way” will appear, instead, as a betrayal -– and no doubt be extensively used to harm the chances of Republicans in America’s upcoming midterm election this November.
• Similarly, it is difficult to see how impoverishing the present government in Iran — through the naval blockade, sanctions and secondary sanctions — will somehow automatically cause its “collapse.” A change of regime, where the government have weapons and the citizenry do not, could “take years.”
• The self-defeating tendency of the US — failing successfully to resolve the final stretch of conflicts, from North Korea to Iraq to Afghanistan — has repeatedly caused the US to “pull defeat from the jaws of victory.” Wars were won, often brilliantly, but quickly lost just after.
• It is understandable that the Iranian people, much as they loathe their regime, are reluctant to submit themselves to another such mass slaughter again.
• The time has come for the US administration to work with the Iranian public– not just its intolerable leadership — to find a better alternative, even if other countries along the Gulf might prefer a “weak Iran” to a “strong democracy” to protect their own hold on power.

While the world’s attention has been focused on diplomatic efforts to end the Iran war, the Iranian regime — whatever is left of it, that is — has been busy doing what it does best: brutalising its own people.

At the same time that the Trump administration has been repeatedly offering Tehran the possibility of a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, the Islamic hardliners still running the country are seeking to reassert their stranglehold over the Iranian people by embarking on a fresh round of executions.

Despite giving US President Donald Trump assurances in January that Tehran would not carry out the planned executions of around 800 protesters detained during the wave of anti-government protests that erupted at the start of the year, the Islamic regime has now resumed its barbaric execution programme, with most of the accused first being subjected to torture before being led to the gallows.

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