Iran's Oct. 7 attack on Israel, support of proxy terror groups, accelerated uranium production was always about preventing peace in the Gulf.

The situation with Iran, never overly stable after 48 years on the brink, has at last boiled over.

The U.S. has long had a red line: No nuclear Iran.

Reports indicated Iran was close. And since October 7, 2023, when the Iranian government’s proxy terrorist fronts attacked Israel, the long-simmering conflict between Iran and Israel, Iran and the U.S., Iran and its neighbors, has been heating from a simmer to a five-alarm fire.

Israel started by systematically keeping the promises its government made in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 terrorist attack: Every single organization, individual, state, or entity who aided, abetted, sponsored, or profited from the attack on Israel would be neutralized.

Israelis would never again be terrorized in the their homes, schools, hospitals, music festivals.

But after Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel was bound to address the ultimate architect of proxy terror in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf: Iran. At the heart of much of the regional instability and violence, the Iranian regime. 

Iran’s neighbors were fed up long before October 7, 2023. That’s why Iran sponsored the massive terror attack in the first place. 

Prior to that date, Israel was making peace progress with its neighbors. Middle Eastern and Gulf nations were normalizing relations, one by one, with Israel. Saudi Arabia, it was widely beleived and thought, would soon join the Abraham Accords, first inked in 2020.

The Iranian regime could not allow this.

And so, through its terror proxies, Iran’s rulers orchestrated October 7. The plan was that Israel would be enraged by the brutality and shamelessness of the attack — the mass rapes, the torture and murder of entire families, the mass taking of hostages, and much of it filmed by the perpetrators themselves.

The brutality and shamelessness was part of the strategy. It wasn’t “freedom fighters” or Hamas lieutenants “losing control” of their soldiers. It was calculated to bait Israel into war.

Iranian rulers knew that neither Iran nor all its proxies could win a war with Israel. But they hoped that Israel’s counterattack, which was bound to come, would force Gulf nations like Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia back to Iran’s side.

It didn’t work.

Israel did what it had to do after October 7. And Gulf and Middle Eastern nations did not abandon the peace process with Israel.

Today, after a joint attack on Iran’s leadership by Israel and the United States, Iran launched a counter attack against several of its neighbors.

“Iran just fired missiles at five countries simultaneously,” reported Shanaka Anslem Perera on X.

Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan — perhaps even Saudi Arabia, though no confirmation has been issued by the kingdom yet.

“Now understand what Iran just accomplished strategically,” pointed out Mr. Perera. “In attempting to retaliate against Israel and America, the IRGC fired missiles at six sovereign nations in a single morning. Not one of those nations attacked Iran. Bahrain did not bomb Tehran. The UAE did not launch strikes on Isfahan. Qatar hosted diplomatic back channels. Kuwait maintained neutrality for three decades. Jordan was mediating. Iran just converted every neutral and semi-neutral state in the Gulf into a potential co-belligerent. Every nation whose airspace was violated, whose civilians were killed, whose sovereignty was breached now has legal and political justification to join whatever coalition forms next.”

Most of the nations targeted were signers of the Abraham Accords.

It’s unconscionable. It’s inconceivable. 

It was a cowardly, pointless, destructive act meant to punish people in nations who wanted nothing more than peace and prosperity. It was devoid of consideration for human life.

It was also a good, hard look at what the (probably now former) rulers of Iran really intended with all their scheming and violence.

It is to be hoped that the peace loving people of every nation, not least of all in Iran, will come together at this time to declare, with one voice, that peace will prevail.

This conflict can be contained, and it will be. Iran’s government was a rogue actor on the world stage, and it has been for a long time.

It was brutally repressing the people of Iran, quite apart from everything else. 

Today, military action. Tomorrow, with hope, a free Iran.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)