For years, my columns and commentaries painted a clear, unambiguous picture. I saw Israel’s actions against Iran not as defense, but as a reckless war of choice. When the strikes began, I was one of the first to call them out. I pointed to the horrific reports from the Evin Prison strike, citing the death toll of 71—prisoners, staff, families—as incontrovertible proof of war crimes. I was convinced that the narrative of “surgical precision” was a cynical lie, shattered by detailed accounts of bombed hospitals and slain medical staff.

More than that, I believed I understood the 'why.' When President Trump made his now-infamous “Let Bibi go” comment, it confirmed everything I suspected. This wasn’t about pre-emptive self-defense; it was a political gambit, a massive, deadly distraction to ensure Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political survival. I wrote with righteous certainty that this was a ‘forever war’ manufactured for political gain, and I viewed Israel’s official justifications with the deepest possible suspicion. I saw the images of mass funerals in Tehran and felt sympathy for the Iranian people, victims of what I framed as Israeli aggression. The narrative was simple, powerful, and, I believed with every fiber of my being, true.

I was wrong.

My change of mind wasn’t a single, blinding flash of light. It was more like a slow, agonizing process of my most cherished certainties being ground to dust. The catalyst was not a press release or a slickly produced video. It was a document, a dry, technical brief that was never meant for my eyes, passed to me by a former colleague in European intelligence. It had nothing to do with Israeli politics or PR. It was a dispassionate analysis of Iran’s nuclear program, filled with charts and enrichment percentages.

On the final page was a graph. A simple line tracking uranium enrichment purity and stockpile size. For years, it had crept upwards. But then, in the most recent quarter, the line went nearly vertical. It wasn’t a projection; it was a measurement of established fact. Above this terrifying spike was a date, a “point of no return,” just weeks away from the day I was reading it. This wasn't a slogan from a politician; it was a conclusion reached by physicists and engineers. It was the moment the theoretical threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, a threat they have explicitly and repeatedly promised to use on Israel, became an imminent, mathematical certainty. That graph didn't just challenge my narrative; it shattered it.

Suddenly, I had to re-examine everything. My first and most deeply held conviction was that Israel was committing war crimes. I had the Evin Prison death toll memorized. But with this new context—the context of a last-ditch effort to stop a nuclear holocaust—I started digging deeper, past the headlines. I sought out the raw intelligence, the satellite imagery, the target mapping that preceded “Operation Am Kelavi.”

What I found was sickening, but not for the reason I expected. I saw IRGC command-and-control bunkers built directly beneath hospitals. I saw mobile missile launchers intentionally parked in the courtyards of schools and next to residential buildings. The awful truth began to dawn: the responsibility for civilian casualties, the very definition of a war crime, lay with the Iranian regime’s illegal and morally bankrupt strategy of using its own people as human shields. The targets of the Israeli strikes were, with astonishing precision, the head of the serpent: top-tier IRGC commanders, key nuclear scientists, and critical weapons infrastructure. My certainty about Israeli malice crumbled, replaced by the horrifying realization of the Iranian regime’s utter cynicism.

Next, I had to confront my belief that this was “Bibi’s war.” It was an easy, compelling narrative. It fit neatly with the global portrait of a desperate leader. But the graph I saw predated his latest political troubles. The intelligence wasn't just Israeli; it was American, British, French, and German. The “point of no return” was a scientific fact, not a political one. I was forced to confront an uncomfortable question: if your enemy, who has sworn to annihilate you, is weeks away from acquiring the means to do so, and all diplomatic avenues have been exhausted and used by them as a smokescreen, what do you do? Do you wait to be destroyed to prove your moral purity?

International law is not a suicide pact. The modern doctrine of anticipatory self-defense exists for precisely this scenario. I had dismissed this justification as a legal loophole, but now I saw it for what it was: the only rational choice left. The choice wasn't between a limited strike and peace. It was between a limited strike now, or a full-scale, catastrophic, potentially nuclear war later. Israel’s action wasn't an act of escalation; it was a desperate, violent act of de-escalation to prevent an apocalypse.

Finally, I had to reconsider my view of the Iranian people. I saw the state-run television coverage of “hundreds of thousands” of mourners and accepted it as the authentic voice of a nation. I read the human-interest stories of terrified Iranians and felt their fear. But then I started seeking out other voices: Iranian dissidents, journalists who had escaped, families of those executed by the regime. They told me a different story. They spoke of the IRGC not as a national army, but as a brutal occupying force in their own country, a fanatical death cult that had hijacked their culture and future. They explained that attendance at state funerals was often coerced, a public display of loyalty to avoid a visit from the secret police.

They told me that Israel’s message of a “favor” was, in the privacy of their homes, viewed not as an insult, but as a sliver of hope. Eliminating the greatest engine of terror was not an attack on their country; it was an attack on their jailers. A world without the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps isn’t just a safer world for Israel and the West; it is a freer world for the people of Iran.

I do not write this to claim I now have all the answers. The cost of any conflict is agonizingly high, and no military action is without tragic consequences. But I write this to state, plainly, that I was wrong. My certainty was a luxury built on an incomplete and dangerously misleading story. I allowed my focus on the politics of one nation to blind me to the existential fanaticism of a regime. I confused the tyrant with his victims. And I mistook a necessary act of self-preservation for an unprovoked act of aggression.

My journey from one viewpoint to the other was difficult, and it required me to dismantle beliefs I held as central to my identity. I only ask you to do the same: question the narrative that feels the most comfortable. The truth, I’ve learned, is rarely found there. It is often found in the uncomfortable, complex, and terrifying places we are most reluctant to look.