Real Clear Defense | By Charles Wald | March 23, 2026
Just a few months after leaving office, President Theodore Roosevelt, in his famous speech in Paris on April 23, 1910, titled Citizenship in a Republic, famously said that “the man in the arena” is the one who counts. This ageless quote can serve as a good guide for the United States in deciding who to count on when figuring out the future of Iran.
Operation Epic Fury was the right call. The Supreme Leader is dead. His defense minister, IRGC commander, and senior intelligence chiefs are confirmed killed. For forty-seven years this regime held the world hostage, and the Commander-in-Chief struck with precision and resolve. As a Air Force pilot, I salute the courage of that decision.
But I spent 35 years in the United States Air Force. I have planned and executed operations of exactly this kind. And I am telling you, with the bluntness my service demands: what we have started, bombs alone cannot finish.
Khamenei’s body is in the rubble, and the IRGC is still launching missiles at Israel and American bases across six countries. They have declared forty days of mourning and promised retaliation that will “stab America in the heart.” Killing the head did not kill the beast. It never does — not without a force on the ground to finish what the bombs started.
Iran is not a flat desert. It is a mountainous nation of 90 million people with a regime that spent forty-seven years building redundancy into every command structure and communications network. They killed over seven thousand of their own citizens in January alone. Cornered with no internal force to replace them, they will kill hundreds of thousands more. The only way to complete this through military force alone would require two hundred thousand boots on the ground — in a country four times the size of Iraq. No president will send that force. Nor should they.
The question is: what is the solution?
The answer is already on the ground.
On February 23 — five days before our missiles struck — roughly 250 fighters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (also known as the MEK) breached the outer security perimeter of the very same Motahari Complex we hit five days later. They engaged 8,000 defenders. They fought for hours. They disabled surveillance cameras from inside Khamenei’s compound with help from people within the regime’s innermost security circle. Over 100 were killed or captured. The rest withdrew and await redeployment.
You cannot fake what happened on Pasteur Street. You cannot breach a compound defended by 8,000 guards without years of intelligence penetration, deep organizational infrastructure, and a population willing to shelter you at the risk of their own lives. The regime can kill the fighters — but it cannot undo the fact that they reached the heart of Tehran five days before American missiles did.
And they have not stopped. MEK armed units attacked the IRGC garrison in Hashtgerd, twenty-five miles west of Tehran, inflicting heavy casualties. In Isfahan, Resistance Units destroyed the regime’s judiciary and intelligence ministry buildings. While our pilots strike from thirty thousand feet, these fighters are striking from the streets of Iranian cities. No cruise missile can replicate that.
I first came to know this movement when they were in Iraq. The MEK residents exposed critical intelligence about Tehran’s malign activities in Iraq that saved American lives, a debt we never repaid. I have since visited MEK members in Ashraf 3 in Albania and met Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran in Paris.
Maryam Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan reads like a constitution written by the Founding Fathers: separation of religion and state, free elections, gender equality, abolition of the death penalty, and a non-nuclear Iran.
As our bombs fell last week, her first message was not about power — it was about protecting civilians and children. Rajavi announced the NCRI’s provisional government, prepared since 1981, and declared: “Iran is not its regime. Iran is its people.”
That is not someone waiting for America to hand her a country. That is someone who has earned the right to lead one.
President Trump is a dealmaker. He knows a real asset from a counterfeit. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last monarch who was deposed in 1979, has no organization inside Iran. His social media following is forensically documented as 89 percent bots. To put him in power would require sending 200,000 troops to place the crown on his head. He is not an alternative. He is a dependency.
The MEK reached Pasteur Street without a single American dollar, weapon, or soldier. That is the definition of a real asset.
The United States does not need to send a single soldier and does not need to occupy Iranian soil. Recognizing the National Council of Resistance of Iran and Mrs. Rajavi’s provisional government would send a powerful message. We should abandon four decades of demonization against the organized resistance manufactured by the very regime our bombs are now destroying. Our bombs cannot do it alone without a force on the ground. But there is a force on the ground — and they have paid for this moment with 120,000 lives.
President Roosevelt’s words were never more urgent. The credits belong to those in the arena. They are fighting right now for the same values invoked when President Trump told Iranians: “The hour of your freedom is at hand.”
It is the only deal that works.
Chuck Wald is a retired U.S. Air Force general and former deputy commander of U.S. European Command.
