Finish the War

You may not agree with America’s war on Iran. A recent Quinnipiac Poll shows that most Americans (53%) oppose the war. An even greater number of Americans oppose “boots on the ground.” Protestors are marching in the streets across America demanding that the US and Israel stop attacking a country that only a month ago killed 30,000 Iranian protestors for doing exactly what the American protestors are now doing here. And newspapers splash rumors of senior administration officials looking for off-ramps to get us out of this sticky situation – fast – as President Trump asserts that we are way ahead of schedule and that the fighting should be over “very soon.”

I also have my doubts about this war but I don’t have access to the data needed to make a rational judgment. Nobody knows how close the Iranians were to building a nuclear weapon. Our judgment is tainted by the “weapons of mass destruction” that Iraq’s Sadaam Hussein supposedly had but actually didn’t back in the Second Gulf War. And our judgment is further clouded by a political leader who lies blatantly about almost everything.

But lives are at stake and we must make decisions rationally and not emotionally. This phase of the war did not begin on February 27, 2026 with the aerial attacks that wiped a swath of Iran’s Islamic leadership (including the Supreme Leader) along with a slew of their offensive weapons. Or with the attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June of 2025 – the so-called twelve day war. It began on October 7, 2023. This was the day that terrorist fighters from Hamas attacked Israel killing more than 1200 innocent people and taking 254 more people captives as hostages (including many Americans).

Iran trained those terrorists, Iran equipped those terrorists and Iran paid their salaries. It was then (or soon afterward) that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu realized that Israel would never have peace as long as the radical Islamist regime controlled Iran. Because it was the threat of peace (if you can call it that) that motivated Iran to initiate the attacks. Just weeks before the Hamas attack (September 20, 2023) Bret Baier of Fox News had an interview with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman where the prince said “every day is a day closer to peace with Israel”. The mullahs of Iran could never allow peaceful relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel (a game-changing expansion of the Abraham Accords) and so the attack was initiated. Israeli PM Netanyahu realized that Iran would never rest until Israel was destroyed so he knew he had to eliminate that horrible regime.

I believe that Mr. Netanyahu would have attacked Iran with or without US support. It was Israeli intelligence that uncovered the time and location of top Iranian leaders in Tehran. And it was Israeli fighter jets that delivered the knock-out blow to the meeting site killing the Supreme Leader and most of his top lieutenants. President Trump said that the peace negotiations with the Iranians led by his special envoy Steve Witkoff were going nowhere and that he “had no choice” but to pre-empt the imminent danger posed by Iran by joining the Israeli attack. But, while we all knew that the Iranians were using the peace talks merely as a stall tactic, the talks were worse than useless because the Israelis knew that any negotiation that allowed the continuation of the Islamist regime in Iran was an existential threat to Israel. When the opportunity to decapitate that regime arose they were determined to take action.

Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in The Free Press an article titled, A War the US Didn’t Need that gave ten good reasons why America should not have gone to war with Iran (at least at this moment in time). But what Mr. Haass does not do it to show us a path to get out of the war. Here is the problem. Retired General Jack Keane in an interview on Fox News discussed how well US and Israeli forces are connected because of our shared principles and objectives. But while our principles are very similar our objectives are different. While Mr. Trump and most Americans consider the Islamist regime in Iran to be evil and dangerous, it is not an existential threat to us as long as it does not have nuclear weapons. But to Mr. Netanyahu and the Israelis that regime, even without nuclear weapons, is still an existential threat so he will not stop at anything short of regime change.

President Trump tried a new strategy in Venezuela that is supposedly more in line with his America First agenda than regime change. It’s more like regime modification. Decapitate the head of the regime and replace him with someone more pliant and willing to accept orders from Trump. But the Venezuela Plan (which actually isn’t working as well as it should) won’t work at all in Iran. The leadership in Venezuela was totally corrupt, but corrupt people don’t really care who they work with as long as their corruption can continue. The people of Venezuela have long since stopped dancing in the streets and are now asking when is my life going to get better.

The leadership of Iran may be evil but they are not as corrupt as that of Venezuela. The mullahs as well as the IRGC are true believers and are willing to sacrifice life on earth for life in heaven. President Trump believes them to be evil but they believe that they are doing Allah’s work. Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security advisor in the first Trump administration, wrote in the Free Press that President Trump stated, “I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei.”

Regime survival would leave an even more determined and vengeful country at this crucial crossroad of energy and politics. Russia and China, who are currently missing during this war, would happily resupply a resurgent regime intent on destroying Israel and disrupting the West. That means more oil supply disruptions, more economic uncertainty in addition to more terrorist attacks and renewed focus on developing nuclear weapons. Starting this war may have been a bad idea but not finishing it would be an even worse idea.