Ahmed Charai, according to the Gatestone Institute, where I read his latest commentary, publishes the Moroccan weekly Magazine L’observateur as well as the French edition of the Foreign Policy magazine. As As an expert on Morocco and North Africa, he sits on the board of Trustees of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
He has also written the flat-out best explanation of why it was so important – so imperative – for the USA and Israel to incapacitate Iran’s war machine and decapitate its leadership that I have seen. It is titled “Courage, Not Recklessness: Why Netanyahu and Trump Were Right on Iran”.
Here is a link to this commentary.
And here is how Mr. Charai begins. But please, please, do yourself a major favor and read all the rest. Every word of it.
- On October 7, Israel was not merely attacked. It was meant to be broken.
- Israel did not collapse. It stood up. It buried its dead, fought for its hostages, and absorbed a shock that would have shattered many nations.
- Israel also understood something essential: if October 7 was to remain a horror rather than become a model, it was not enough to strike only the hand that carried out the massacre. The source had to be confronted.
- Recklessness would have been to let Tehran continue believing that it could arm militias, terrorize its neighbors, destabilize capitals, and remain beyond consequence.
- For too long, Iran’s rulers had assumed that democracies would hesitate forever and confuse fear with prudence.
- Courage is the willingness to act when the cost of inaction has become greater than the risk of action.
- The Abraham Accords were never just a diplomatic ceremony. They were a strategic and civilizational choice: a decision in favor of modernity, sovereignty, development, and peace against a regional order built on militias, intimidation, and permanent war. This conflict did not change that choice. It tested it—and it held. That may be one of the most important political facts emerging from this war.
- Netanyahu… did not choose comfort. He chose responsibility. And Trump, whatever one may think of him on other issues, grasped something many others did not: there are moments when deterrence cannot be restored by speeches, conferences, or carefully worded illusions. It must be restored by force.
- That is not recklessness. That is leadership.
