Donald Trump shared the post as if nailing a threat to the door: if the Islamic Republic began to massacre its people, he vowed, America was ‘locked and loaded and ready to go’.
It was a stark – and welcome – contrast to the limp words that then-President Barack Obama offered during the 2009 Iranian uprisings. As regime forces butchered people with promiscuous abandon, Obama had pursed his lips and admonished the mullahs.
‘The world is watching,’ he said, disapprovingly.
Obviously, it made no difference.
Trump has made his stance clear. Yet now the time has come to prove whether his rhetoric was mere bluster or an actual pledge.
Because on Saturday the mullahs did what they always do when they plan to spill blood: they cut the country’s communications, choking the protesters by severing the fibre-optic cables. Iran went into a near-total digital blackout.
I realised almost immediately from the sudden silence of people inside Iran who had been speaking to me.
Chats previously humming with updates, gallows humour and gossip suddenly went dead.
Debris burns outside a religious centre in the city of Gorgan
Clearly this was no ‘technical issue’. It was a state act and an order from the very highest levels.
Soon the news was global and even Amnesty condemned it. (Spare a thought for their poor activists, no doubt distraught at having to condemn a fanatical Islamist regime)
This is the Islamic Republic’s modus operandi. Cut the light, then swing the truncheon, block the footage and bury the dead.
But even through the blackout, scraps of video and testimony are dribbling out: footage of regime thugs firing live rounds, bloodied bodies in the dirt.
The opposition channel Iran International reports claims of mass casualties and security forces using live fire; other outlets describe the same grim arc.
This is the culmination of Iran’s long cycle of protests – but now the demands have changed irretrievably. Once, the protesters chanted for reform. About loosening the veil. About votes, rights – ‘woman, life, freedom’ (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi), they roared.
That’s over. The people now want the regime gone.
Nothing less will do.
A system can survive protests that demand better treatment. It can’t survive a mass movement that asks for its head. The mullahs’ downfall is inevitable, even if not necessarily imminent.
Don’t believe me? Consider the image that has become a shorthand for these protests. A young woman lighting her cigarette with a burning poster of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It is layers of defiance: she is female, unveiled, publicly smoking and desecrating the wizened features of Iran’s Islamist Saruman – in one cold act.
Family members grieve a loved one apparently killed in anti-regime demonstrations in Tehran
The clip has gone viral and the message is unmistakable: our supposed Supreme Leader is mere kindling now.
The battle is set and the sides are clear. Now Trump must act.
But he needs to be smart about it. Above all, any US operation should be guided by one overarching principle: action does not mean invasion.
Anyone whispering ‘boots on the ground’ is either selling a drawn-out war or a fantasy.
Iran is not Iraq. Iran is a huge fortress made of geography and history. Its western flank is ribbed with the Zagros mountains; its north has the Alborz; its interior has deserts that eat supply lines and its cities are large, dense and primed for urban war.
March in and you give the regime what it wants: an invader to blame, a cause to rally to.
The ancient warning still holds. The colossally rich Roman senator Marcus Crassus marched east chasing glory and gold and got annihilated at Carrhae in 53BC: his legions broken by distance, heat and an enemy that understood its own ground. The details may differ; the lesson does not.
So Trump must be surgical, not maximal. As Andrew Fox, senior fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and a former British Army officer, observes, ‘the aim here is not to occupy Iran, but to create the conditions for regime collapse from within’.
Trump must start by saying, clearly and publicly, that the blackout is being watched and that mass killing will trigger specific consequences within a defined window. Then he needs to pick a variety of key levers that hit the regime but not the people. He must make the ayatollahs pay but stop short of all-out war.
Here are the most plausible routes. Some can be done quietly, some less so. They can be layered or discrete but together they will form relentless pressure on the falling regime.
The first counter-move is to pierce the blackout: satellite internet, anti-jamming workarounds or a rapid deployment of alternative communications. Deny the regime the cover it needs to kill unseen.
A protester holds aloft a portrait of the exiled son of Iran’s last shah amid a crowd in footage from Iran
Second, personalise the punishment. Don’t go after ‘Iran’ as an abstraction, but after the guilty. Name and shame them: the commanders, judges, prison chiefs, Revolutionary Guard officers, the men who give the order to fire and the men who sign the warrants afterwards. And those you can’t kill, crush. Freeze their assets, expose their foreign-based families and foreign holdings – make loyalty expensive.
Third, build a deterrent ring around the machinery of repression. Live rounds are being used; this means that specific units, bases, command nodes and logistics hubs are enabling that violence. Destroy these bases without mercy but with accuracy and clear limits. Tie the strikes to defined triggers: confirmed mass killings or sustained fire against crowds.
Make the cowards with guns wonder whether their next volley into their fellow citizens will bring destruction to their own barracks. Make obedience if not fatal, then at least dangerous.
And of course, as we know, the US can strike Iranian targets at will: Iran’s skies are wide open. The Israelis proved that fighting the mullahs last June. The aim should be to do all this without forgetting the key principle. As Andrew Fox put it to me, ‘You’re using military force in support of something else – a political end-state delivered by somebody else.’
The goal is not utter annihilation but, as Fox adds, parts of the military must either be taken off the field, broken, or persuaded to stand down. ‘Something dramatic enough to trigger defections or elite collapse – for example, the storming of a major palace, or visible breakdown of command authority.’
The aim is not conquest. It is paralysis and fear at the top.
Fourth, keep Israel out of the frame, because the Iranian regime thrives on conspiracy. Let Tehran paint this as a Zionist plot and it will rally its base and justify its terror. Its army of online inadequates and Western fellow travellers will ooze their poison across our feeds. If force is used, it must be a solely American response to mass killing.
Fifth, do not confuse regime collapse with the final outcome. Even if the mullahs fall, what fills the vacuum might well be savage. Who knows what might emerge: a praetorian strongman, a new tyranny in a different uniform, or just chaos. All remain possible.
So while the immediate task is to stop a slaughter, Washington must think beyond this. I know there are already back channels open to credible civic figures, as well as possible diaspora leaders. This will be crucial.
And through all of this, Mr President, keep your head. As you know, the aim is not to ‘save face’. It is to save lives without igniting a regional war.
Only the United States has the power to do that. Only you have the will to make it happen. So please do it now. Make it controlled and surgical and deadly. The world is watching.
