They Don’t Want Iran To Lose

Adriana Stone 0 1 min read

They Don’t Want Iran To Lose

Tom Friedman said it out loud on CNN. He wants Iran toppled. He just doesn’t want the political winners to be President Donald Trump or Bibi Netanyahu.

That’s a weird place for a journalist to land. National security should come first. Party politics should not drive whether a brutal regime gets pushed out.

Here’s exactly what Friedman said:

FRIEDMAN: Yes, there’s been some leadership change. Obviously, certain people have been killed. But this is the Iranian regime. It goes right down to the mayoral level. All the institutions are the same.
Yes. I find myself, Michael, in a situation where I really want to see Iran defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people in the region. And nothing would improve the region more than the replacement of this regime in Iran with one was focused on enabling its people to realize their full potential and integrating peacefully with other countries and stop occupying Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
So I’m all for that. The problem is I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings. They are both engaged in anti- democratic projects in their own countries. They’re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America’s standing in the world and Israel standing in the world.
And so I really find myself torn. I want to see Iran militarily defeated, but I do not want to see these two terrible people strengthened.

That quote is blunt. No hedging. No spin. He lays out the trade-off clearly: he supports regime change in Tehran, but not if it boosts politicians he dislikes.

Call it honesty. Call it hypocrisy. Either way, it reveals the problem. Too many in media and the left measure foreign policy by domestic scoreboards. They treat wins like campaign trophies. That hurts the country.

People can disagree on strategy. Fine. But admitting you’d prefer a dangerous regime to survive rather than hand your opponents a political win? That’s something else.

Politics is dirty. War is deadly. Mixing the two like this is dangerous. We should judge outcomes by national interest first. Not by who gets the next headline.

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