President Donald Trump said about the airstrike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a week ago: “I got him before he got me.” Iran had plotted to assassinate Trump, he explained. “Well, I got him first.”

Few people outside of Iran will mourn Khamenei, who devoted himself to a decades-long campaign to kill Americans, Israelis and his own dissidents. But Trump’s comment indicates how targeted killing—assassination, in blunt terms—has become normalized in modern warfare. Gangland terms like “getting him” and “taking him out” are now commonplace.

President Donald Trump said about the airstrike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a week ago: “I got him before he got me.” Iran had plotted to assassinate Trump, he explained. “Well, I got him first.”

Few people outside of Iran will mourn Khamenei, who devoted himself to a decades-long campaign to kill Americans, Israelis and his own dissidents. But Trump’s comment indicates how targeted killing—assassination, in blunt terms—has become normalized in modern warfare. Gangland terms like “getting him” and “taking him out” are now commonplace.

“Decapitation” is emerging as the American way of war, after two frustrating decades of unsuccessful “nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan. A week into the Iran campaign with Israel, the United States’ goal seems to be destruction of Iran’s leadership and military infrastructure—with an ill-defined hope that a better regime will rise from the rubble.

It’s the strategic equivalent of a “fire and forget” missile. The goal is to destroy the Iranian regime’s leadership and structure of repression. Building a new Iran is an afterthought. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” one key member of Congress mused to me. But U.S. intelligence........

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