Great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events.
By Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic
“Battles are the principal milestones in secular history,” Winston Churchill observed in his magisterial biography of the Duke of Marlborough in 1936. “Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth … But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.” So it was then, and so it is today.
Iran’s war with Israel is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s inveterate hostility to the Jewish state. It has consisted of multiple campaigns, including terror attacks against Jewish communities abroad (Argentina in 1994, for example) and missile salvos aimed at Israel (including from Lebanon and Iran itself last year). But three great events—the smashing of Hezbollah, the Syrian revolution that overthrew the Iranian-aligned regime, and now a climactic battle waged by long-range strikes and Mossad hit teams in Tehran—are changing the Middle East. We are living through the kind of moment that Churchill described.
