Finish the job, Mr. President

By Kyle Moran
Real Clear Wire

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.

The opening strikes that killed his father also killed his wife and at least one of his sons. He himself was pulled from the rubble with injuries serious enough that he has not appeared publicly since, operating instead from an undisclosed location with limited communications. This is not a man weighing a cost-benefit analysis – he is running a war of survival with nothing left to lose personally.

And even if Mojtaba were removed tomorrow, Iran’s Supreme Leader is chosen by a body of senior clerics drawn exclusively from within the revolutionary establishment – a system that by design cannot produce a moderate successor. There is no Iranian equivalent of a post-Maduro transition, where a personalist dictator was removed and replaced by figures who, whatever their flaws, were at least less ideologically committed to confrontation with Washington.

Which brings us to the single most dangerous consequence of leaving this campaign unfinished. The strikes have stripped Iran of much of its conventional arsenal that it’s spent decades building – from ballistic missiles to its navy to its proxy leverage from Beirut to Sanaa – and in doing so has proven beyond any doubt that none of it was sufficient to protect the regime from the air.

Every surviving regime official in Tehran is drawing the obvious conclusion from this: The only deterrent that would have actually prevented it is a nuclear weapon. Walking away now – after demonstrating beyond any doubt that Iran’s conventional forces cannot protect the regime from the air – hands the most compelling argument for a nuclear sprint to the very people least inclined to be talked out of it. If enrichment infrastructure and reconstitution capacity aren’t destroyed before the victory laps begin, the United States will have spent billions proving to Iran that it needs a bomb and then left it with the means to build one.

To be clear, the argument for seeing this through is not a sunk cost fallacy. The United States and Israel are winning this campaign decisively and historically. The concern is not that we are losing and need to justify the cost, but that we are on the verge of the most significant strategic victory in the Middle East in a generation and are now at serious risk of throwing it away because oil hit $100 a barrel and the midterms are 18 months out.

What makes this moment so critical is that the campaign has reached the phase where its most strategically consequential work is being done.

In the last day or two, strikes have turned toward the regime’s internal repression machinery – many Basij paramilitary bases in Tehran have been hit, alongside police headquarters and intelligence buildings. An Israeli official told the Times of Israel that “when we said that we’re trying to create the conditions for regime change, these are the kinds of things that we’re referring to.” The regime clearly knows what’s at risk from losing control internally, too – the Islamic Republic’s police chief warned on state television that anyone acting “at the will of the enemy” would be met with “fingers on the triggers.”

With Nowruz – the Persian New Year, a massive national celebration that has historically served as a flashpoint for anti-regime unrest – approaching on March 20, degrading these forces creates precisely the opening that decades of regime control have denied the Iranian people. Stopping now leaves the regime’s domestic grip intact while having radicalized a wounded successor with every reason to sprint for a nuclear weapon. That is not an off-ramp.

The decision to launch this operation was the right one, but walking away before it’s finished risks the worst of all outcomes: a regime that now knows that its conventional deterrent is worthless and has every incentive to pursue the one weapon that would have prevented this war in the first place.

Kyle Moran is a political commentator specializing in international affairs and national security. His research on the Middle East has been published in the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, and his commentary has been featured widely in outlets ranging from RealClearPolitics to the Washington Examiner.