Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That’s who the U.S. and Israel reportedly planned to install atop Iran’s decapitated regime. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline former Iranian president whose fraudulent reelection win in 2009 triggered the largest mass protests in Iran since the revolution and who has blood on his hands from the brutal crackdown that followed. The anti-American 9/11 truther who once hosted a conference for Holocaust deniers, who helped facilitate the IRGC’s stranglehold on Iran’s economy, and whose vulgar and histrionic rhetoric prompted widespread condemnation and ridicule — including a vintage SNL digital short featuring Adam Levine. The guy who, after losing his clout within Iran, amid several stymied attempts to run for president again, eventually became a weird Twitter gadfly whose commentary on politics and pop culture were treated like a running joke.

It was already abundantly clear that Donald Trump’s war in Iran was poorly conceived, inadequately planned, and generally a recipe for geopolitical disaster. The war itself has been a strategic failure by most any measure. Iran’s decapitated regime didn’t just survive; it’s become even more hardline and inflexible. The war hasn’t eliminated the threat the regime posed; it has exacerbated it, prompting Iran to seize leverage it didn’t have before the war, over the Strait of Hormuz, over Gulf oil trade and infrastructure, and, as a result, over the global economy (and U.S. fuel prices). Iran’s military capabilities have been seriously degraded by thousands of U.S.-Israeli air strikes — at the........

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