EVERYONE HAS A PLAN UNTIL THEY GET PUNCHED IN THE MOUTH: Iran had a plan to fight Israel and the US. It all collapsed after October 7.

And yet, since the joint US-Israeli airstrikes against Iran began over the weekend, killing its supreme leader and devastating the regime’s military and infrastructure, the response from the axis of resistance has been fairly feeble.

The Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which in the past has boasted of the ability to destroy Tel Aviv, fired a “handful” of rockets into Israel, which prompted a much larger campaign of airstrikes by Israel in southern Lebanon and Beirut. Wary of being dragged into yet another war, the Lebanese government has taken the unprecedented step of banning military activities by the group. Yemen’s Houthis, who dramatically shut down most global shipping through the Red Sea two years ago, have been conspicuously quiet. Militants in Iraq claimed a drone attack on a US military base in Erbil, but the attack was intercepted without any casualties, and some groups seem to be staying quiet.

The impotent response is part of a larger story of the Iranian regime’s collapse from a fearsome military power to a weakened state fighting for its survival against an emboldened America and Israel. Rather than secure it from attack, its strategy of backing proxy forces in conflicts abroad played a critical part in dragging it into the existential crisis it faces now.

And while there are a number of factors that led to its unraveling, there’s one clear moment when it all started to go south: Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

That terror invasion was so despicable that it required being a vicious antisemite — or a fairly ordinary leftist — to dismiss or excuse it.