Finish the Job, Mr. President

Fourteen days into Operation Epic Fury, the most consequential American military campaign in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq, the Trump administration has yet to say what victory will actually look like. The president has variously toggled between declaring Iran has “practically nothing left,” indicating that the conflict would be right around the corner, and telling Kentucky rally-goers that we need to “finish the job” so that we don’t have to go back and do this all over again later down the road.

The campaign is succeeding, but that will ultimately make little difference if we stop before the job is done. That might be a general rule of thumb, but it is especially the case given the makeup of the Islamic Republic.

The logic behind an early exit appears to rest on the assumption that the scale of destruction has been so overwhelming that Tehran will eventually accept some form of de-escalation rather than continue absorbing punishment it cannot answer. That may sound reasonable in the abstract, but it fundamentally misreads how Iran works. Mojtaba Khamenei was already among the most dangerous figures in the Islamic Republic long before the war began – he backed the brutal crackdown on the 2009 Green Movement, spent years running the Basij militia’s economic and intelligence operations, and has pushed for actual nuclear weaponization far more aggressively than his father ever did. Analysts have long regarded him as the elder Khamenei’s hardline version on steroids.