In announcing that the U.S. war objectives in Iran have been nearly completed, U.S. President Donald Trump also reminded listeners that this war in the Middle East and North Africa has been going on for 47 years, or since the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. A watershed year, 1979 marked the end of the Iranian Revolution, the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis, and (in Afghanistan) the beginning of an attempt to create a Soviet foothold in both the Middle East and South Asia. The next year saw the start of the Iran-Iraq war, and by that time the Lebanese Civil War was already five years underway. While the Iranian Revolution ended in 1979, the remaining of these conflicts and crises ended around 1988-1990. However, these major wars in the Middle East and North Africa were followed by internecine conflict that involved international jihadist movements, the U.S., and Europe; wars of attrition on several key borders; an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; localized non-state actors fighting their own regimes or a neighboring regime; localized revolutions in Libya and elsewhere; the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan; and, of course, the Arab Spring and the Syrian Revolution.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to prove a counterfactual. Nonetheless, The Art of War by Sun Tzu suggests that, while it is ideal religiously and in terms of military strategy to break the resolve of the enemy without fighting, in a prolonged conflict having allowed time to pass and all possible avenues for peace to have been rejected by a foe, such a peaceful army (in our modern sense of just war) must eradicate the army of the foe on the battlefield so as to leave behind no enemy force, which would naturally only follow and strike later. In that way, the conflict is ended more humanely, that is, with fewer total casualties over time and place. It will not have the opportunity to drag along, it is warned, otherwise sometimes for centuries. This principle stands even while the argument is also made not to corner a desperate enemy prior to reaching the point of what........

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