On October 13, 2023, Mosaic published an article by Aaron MacLean, a veteran of America’s war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and one of America’s smartest military analysts, on strategic options facing the Jewish state in one of its darkest moments. He recently returned from a visit to Israel, where he embedded with the IDF in Gaza and observed fighting on the northern front. In the podcast below, you can hear his reflections on what he saw—ranging from tactical analysis to grand strategy—and hear parts of his on-location conversations with Israeli commanders. He concludes by considering what America can learn from the war being fought by one of its closest allies. (Audio, 78 minutes.)

And in this brief video, you can see MacLean speaking with the Israeli security analyst Sarit Zehavi when a rocket barrage interrupts their conversation:

I recently embedded with the IDF and saw firsthand Israel’s war with Hezbollah and Hamas. What lessons can Americans learn from Israel’s year of fighting for its survival? Out today on @schoolofwarpod.https://t.co/8s01TybKaG pic.twitter.com/QRR7h6zuIt

— Aaron MacLean (@AaronBMacLean) December 10, 2024

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”