VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: In the end, everyone hated the Iranian theocracy

It is hard even to digest the incredible train of events of the past many days in the Middle East.

Iran had been reduced to an anemic, performance-art missile attack on our base in Qatar — the last Parthian shot from a terrified regime, desperate for an out and a ceasefire. Iran would have been better off not launching such a ceremonial but ultimately humiliating proof of impotence.

Even worse for the theocracy, Iran’s temporary reprieve came from the now magnanimous but still hated Donald Trump.

So ends the creepy mystique of the supposedly indomitable terror state of Iran, the bane of the past seven American presidents over half a century.

For Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, it was hard to swallow that U.S. bombers got their permission to fly into Iranian airspace from the Israeli air force.

A good simile is that Trump put a pot of water on the stove, told Iran to jump in, put the lid over them, then smiled, turned up the heat — and will now let them stew.

As postbellum realities now simmer in Iran, the theocracy is left explaining the inexplicable to its humiliated military and shocked but soon-to-be-furious populace. All the regime’s blood-curdling rhetoric, apocalyptic threats against Israel, goose-stepping thugs and shiny new missiles ended in less than nothing.

A trillion dollars and five decades’ worth of missiles and centrifuges are now up in smoke. That money might have otherwise saved Iranians from the impoverishment of the past 50 years.

How about the little Satan Israel, to which Iran for nearly five decades promised extinction? Israel had destroyed Iran’s expeditionary terrorists, Iran’s defenses, its nuclear viability and the absurd mythology of Iranian military competence. And worse, Israel showed it could repeat all that destruction when and if it is necessary.

So the most hated regime in the world crawled into the boiling pot because it looked around in vain for someone to void Trump’s ultimatum for a cease and desist. But there were no last-minute saviors to rescue them.

The dreaded decades-long Iranian nuclear threat? It is either gone for now or, if it resurfaces, it will be again far easier to vaporize at will than to rebuild a lost trillion-dollar investment.

Russia? Its former Obama-Kerry re-invitation back into the Middle East lasted only a decade. It will now cut its losses like it did with the vanished Assad kleptocracy in Syria. Putin exits the Middle East not entirely displeased that his lunatic Iranian client did not get a bomb — but did get its just deserts. A tense Middle East tends to prop up Russian export oil prices.

Did China come to the mullahs’ aid? No, the country’s leaders were not shy about ordering their Iranian lackey to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, through which 50 percent of Chinese-purchased oil passes. For President Xi Jinping, the Iranians are treated as little more than Uyghurs with oil.

The world decided that it was tired of a half-century of crybully terrorism, empty nuke threats, mindless mobs screaming scripted banalities, cowardly murdering and medieval theocrats threatening the general peace. So the world turned its back on Iran. And with a wink and nod, it let Israel and the United States do what they must.

As for Iran’s terrorist appendages, Hezbollah’s commanders are either dead, maimed or in hiding. Hamas has fled into a subterranean labyrinth. The last Assad thug fled to Russia. The crazy Houthis? They are reconsidering the idea of launching their last missile at the cost of their last port or power grid.

The anti-Trump Democrats and loony left? Their talk of impeaching Trump for the supposedly “illegal” 35-minute, one-off strike will fade. The Trump mission equaled less than one day of Obama’s predator drone strikes, targeted killings or his five-year chaotic bombing in Libya.

Is the incoherent left furious that there is no more Iranian nuclear threat? Mad that no Americans were killed last weekend. Or is it raging because Trump ignored Iran’s last-gasp attack and instead orchestrated a cease-fire?

Of course, in the Middle East, there is never a real end to anything. We may see freelancing terrorists try to fill the vacuum of Iran’s decline. Or Iran itself may try to let loose a terrorist cell. It may later boast it has hidden away some enriched uranium.

But no matter. The dimensions of this new Middle East will persist. The new reality is that either Israel or the United States — if they keep their earned confidence within proper limits — can now ensure a non-nuclear Iran by easily blowing up its costly nuclear program as often as it is rebuilt.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.