Important read!-----Our Long Road to War With Iran - Victor Davis Hanson

For decades, Iran cultivated a myth of invincibility through terror and proxies—until war exposed the regime as weaker, poorer, and far more fragile than the world had feared. - Victor Davis Hanson

• Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic.
• All that said, was it really ever all that formidable?...

Under the camouflage of Shiite puritanism and otherworldliness, the ayatollahs proved even more corrupt (and far more incompetent) than the Shah’s entourage. 

They fought a destructive eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s overrated Iraqi dictatorship and showed they were mostly just as militarily incompetent...

• Iran’s zenith in power and prestige came during Obama’s presidency (2009–17), and the so-called “Iran Deal” that they believed would guarantee them eventual nuclear power status...