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Is US President Donald Trump so lacking in self-confidence, so uncertain of his goals and so easily played as to have been dragged into a war with Iran by the rhetorical brilliance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? The critics within his own broad base, asserting that he has sent American soldiers to die in Israel’s war, evidently have a very dim view of his intellect and skill set.

In fact, the Islamic Republic has acted murderously against its own freedom-seeking people, and can be relied upon to do so again if it gets the chance. Unprovoked, it is currently firing missiles and drones at its own Arab neighbors, including some that maintained correct and even warm relations with it. After years in which Israel highlighted that it was expanding its missile range to bring in Europe, and was seeking the capacity to bring the US into range as well, it is indeed now targeting Europe.

As Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff recounted with some amazement on Monday, its negotiators bragged “with no shame” to him and Jared Kushner, as the duo tried last month to negotiate a diplomatic solution to its nuclear program, that it had sidestepped oversight protocols and amassed and maintained enough 60% enriched uranium “to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”

It went straight back to advancing its nuclear weapons ambitions the moment last June’s war was over, even as Trump was confidently asserting that it would do no such thing. And while doing everything in its power to destroy Israel, our tiny country is merely the “Little Satan” in the ideology set out by the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, way back in 1979, while the United States is the corrupt, imperialist “Great Satan.”

Trump on Tuesday described the regime as “lunatics.” He does not doubt the danger it poses to its own people. He has, since his first term, recognized the combined threat that its ideology and a potential nuclear arsenal pose to the free world in general and America in particular.

What is unfolding in Iran right now is indeed Israel’s war; the regime has been working for decades to destroy us.

But it is America’s war, too, as Trump well understands, but his domestic detractors — from his camp and the other side, too — clearly do not.

Planning for ‘total victory’

For almost two-and-half-years now, Netanyahu has been seeking and predicting “total victory” against Hamas in Gaza. As of this writing, Hamas controls almost half of Gaza, where almost all Gazans live. It has not given up its arms, is determined not to do so, and is working to ensure it will retain maximal control in Gaza even if other Palestinians or international bodies and boards attempt to marginalize it.

The prospect of “total victory” over Hezbollah in Lebanon is less remote. Israel’s exploding beeper operation against thousands of the terror group’s operatives in September 2024 caused devastation in terms of its capacities and its morale, and was followed by the killing of most of its leadership. Naim Qassem is a pale, uncharismatic shadow of his eliminated predecessor Hassan Nasrallah. Far more significantly, Lebanon, entirely unlike Gaza, has a government that rightly feared Hezbollah would drag the country into the current war, and has the will, though not the means, to disarm it. Again, entirely unlike Gaza, much of the Lebanese public loathes the terror group more than it loathes Israel.

In Iran, however, the notion of “total victory” is a realistic, albeit immensely complex and ambitious goal. The Islamic Republic — corrupt, misogynistic, disinterested in the well-being of its populace, directing resources to advance a vicious, globally rapacious Islamic extremist ideology — is hated by much of the populace, the more so since it mass-murdered tens of thousands of Iranians during the latest wave of protests in recent weeks. It is sometimes claimed that the ayatollahs have millions in their various armed forces, notably the Basij; the actual figure is hard to estimate, but likely no more than two million — and this in a country of almost 100 million.

The current war — which has been initially targeting the leadership of the regime, its brutal security forces, and its symbols of power, along with its ballistic missile capabilities and, in the last day or so, its nuclear program — is intended, as Trump and Netanyahu have both indicated, to create the conditions in which the Iranian people can take control of their governance. But it is unclear how much planning and coordination was carried out before the US and Israel opened fire, with potentially capable, credible and desired new Iranian leaders.

The portents when it comes to even short-term planning are not hugely encouraging, at least regarding the well-being of American citizens caught up in the conflict. On Monday evening, the State Department issued an urgent security alert, telling Americans in Israel and over a dozen other countries in the region to “Depart now via commercial means due to serious safety risks.” That seemingly panicked directive potentially affects an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Americans in the Middle East, over 200,000 of them in Israel and the West Bank.

Yet for many, there are no readily available “commercial means” to depart; Israel’s airport, for a start, was and remains closed. The US government had not organized evacuation flights. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, acknowledging that there were only “limited options,” resorted to suggesting Americans wanting to leave Israel might try to depart via the Egyptian border at Taba.

If that is symptomatic of the broader planning for the repercussions of this war and its aftermath, specifically when it comes to the desired transition in Iran, then there is every danger that, if and when the US and Israel indeed call the Iranian people back into the streets, a fresh wave of mass protests will founder — that what remains of the regime will prove able to regroup, or that no better leadership will emerge.

Israeli military insiders are worryingly fuzzy about the war’s endgame and how a new Iran might develop, with one talking vaguely about a certain amount of chaos when the fighting stops, with perhaps some kind of ongoing use of force in which the Americans would hopefully closely partner the IDF, in a protracted process that eventually enables the emergence of an alternative leadership.

The idea of “total victory” in the Iranian context is reasonable and necessary. But it does require actual planning.

As was the case last June, the initial strikes on Saturday morning were highly successful, and the achievement was more remarkable this time.

Iran had been taken by surprise nine months ago, and would have thought itself well-prepared to avoid a calamitous repeat.

By opening fire in daylight on a Saturday morning, Israel and the US managed the feat a second time.

The nature of those first strikes was still more remarkable, with supreme leader Ali Khamenei, complacently believing himself secure, eliminated, along with what IDF intelligence chief Shlomi Binder has asserted were 40 key Iranian leadership figures killed in the first 40 seconds of warfare.

Not everything has gone to plan. As of this writing, for instance, it appears that an Israeli strike on Tuesday on the building where Iran’s 88-strong Assembly of Experts was believed to be gathering to elect Khamenei’s successor wound up hitting largely empty premises, with the “experts” wary enough to have cast their votes in absentia.

Israel has managed to intercept most of Iran’s missiles, but there have been deadly strikes — notably the killings of nine people in Beit Shemesh when an Iranian missile smashed into a synagogue and a bomb shelter.

The US has lost six troops as of this writing. Kuwait mistakenly shot down three US F-15s; all their crews managed to eject. That incident underlined the extraordinary value of years of regional planning and drills under the supervision of Centcom, involving Israel and many regional players, including Saudi Arabia and others that do not have formal ties with us. Kuwait, notably, was not involved in those coordination mechanisms.

As the former IDF military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin noted earlier this week, one of Israel’s challenges as regards the now embattled Gulf states is to act and project itself not as a regional aggressor, but as a temperate regional protector, willing and able to play a leading role in defending moderate regimes against extremists. If successful, that could see this conflict catalyzing normalization efforts.

The joint US-Israel goal is to wreck Iran’s missile launchers, stores and production capacity; to target its nuclear sites, and to so batter the regime’s armed forces and their command structures as to minimize their capability to suppress a popular uprising. At the same time, the IDF accepts that it will not be able to destroy all of Iran’s missile or nuclear capabilities; indeed, it believes none of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was destroyed in last June’s war.

Israeli officials have made clear that, in terms of its ballistic missiles, the regime had broadly recovered from the attacks just nine months ago. And they have indicated that Israel cannot sustain a situation in which it is required to keep going to war against Iran once a year or more, facing an ever-more complex challenge in thwarting its exponentially expanding missile arsenal and its insistent nuclear progress. That’s simply not feasible militarily, diplomatically, economically, or in terms of the acute strain on the populace.

The IDF is privately indicating that it and the US forces need at least two more weeks to create conditions in which Iranians might be able to rise up. It hopes, officials have indicated, that diplomacy will not intervene prematurely. Trump has spoken of four weeks or more. In short, the allied militaries and their masters evidently believe that time is on their side.

But so, apparently, does the regime. It could have desperately sought a return to negotiations from the very first hours of the conflict, after Khamenei was killed. But it evidently remained determined not to surrender to the US-Israel demands for an end to its nuclear program, its enrichment, its missile production and its proxies.

Instead, it has determinedly widened the war — striking relentlessly at Israel, but also targeting neighbors that would otherwise have stayed out of the conflict, and bringing Hezbollah into the fighting.

It may have underestimated how much firepower the United States and Israel had readied and are using. But it is plainly betting on survival via attrition — on the likes of the Saudis and Qatar and the UAE urging America to cease fire; on Russia and China seeking to halt the conflict; on Trump being worn down by his domestic opponents; on even Israelis getting exhausted by more multi-front conflict and endless missile strikes. And, by extension, on its capacity to then regroup and, for the time being, quash its domestic opponents.

Again, much depends on what planning has been made, under US leadership, for the day after. Are former would-be genuine reformists poised to practically organize the takeover of parliament, to assume control of the energy industry, to serve as effective new leaders of security forces protecting rather than killing the people? Whatever time remains for the war to go on, every second is invaluable in preparing to enable a new and better Iran.

For the first time ever, Israel went to war fully alongside the world’s only superpower, against a common and wider enemy. For the first time ever, it killed a serving head of state.

A week before the war had even begun, as Witkoff vouchsafed, Trump was a little puzzled over why the regime has not capitulated.

It had and has not capitulated because it will use every weapon and means at its disposal, and expand the conflict in every direction, at any cost, to survive.

Which underlines why it must be defeated. And right now is the best opportunity that Israel, the US, the free world and the Iranian people have ever had to do just that.

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1 IDF hits Iran’s ‘leadership complex’ in Tehran; 12 Israelis hurt in Iran missile strikes

2 Report: Israel hacked Tehran traffic cameras to track Khamenei ahead of assassination

3 Trump says he may have forced Israel’s hand into war with Iranian ‘lunatics’

4 ‘Quiet Death’: Hegseth says US submarine sinks Iranian warship off Sri Lanka, in first since WWII

5 Israel strikes building where Iranian clerics said gathering to elect new supreme leader

6 Israel using cargo ships to bring back doctors stranded abroad by war, official says

7 AnalysisHoping to pressure end to war, Iran aims fire at Arab neighbors. It hasn’t worked, yet

8 Hezbollah fires on Tel Aviv as Israel threatens Iranian officers in Lebanon

US Central Command CENTCOM

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