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In his efforts to make his war on Iran seem thought through and sensible, President Donald Trump is only bolstering the case that it was spun from pipe dreams all along.

The most head-spinning confirmation came on Tuesday, when a reporter asked what would be the war’s worst-case scenario. “I guess,” Trump replied, “the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person—right? That could happen.”

The president may have thought he was coming off as a hardheaded realist, but in fact he looked more irresponsible than ever. Of course, it is always a risk of war that it spawns a world more treacherous than before—and if war is forced upon us, if we have to wage it in self-defense or some other urgent interest, that might be a risk worth taking. But this war is a war of choice. Military officers and intelligence officials have said that Iran posed no “imminent threat”—contrary to Trump’s initial claims. Indeed, in a letter to Congress on Monday justifying the war, Trump himself makes no such assertion. Therefore, if it seemed a fair possibility that war would displace the current Iranian regime with leaders who are worse (more hostile to the West, more oppressive of its people, more destabilizing to the region), then going to war anyway was a bad move.

Trump either didn’t listen to the warnings or discounted the risks. The New York Times reported, in a detailed account of the run-up to the war, that Trump and his top advisers discussed who might rise to power if the current regime were toppled. Analysts presented a few possibilities: the Revolutionary Guard, the elite military unit that is at least as thuggish and anti-Western as the current leaders; a more moderate, pragmatic faction of the Guard; or perhaps no one in particular, just chaos and civil war.

According to the Times’ account, Trump and his team decided that they’d go with the middle option: an Iranian military corps that Washington could deal with. They didn’t stop to think that the Iranians had a vote in the matter—as we have learned over and over, the U.S. is quite skilled at hitting targets, but that doesn’t mean that it can shape what happens after the smoke........

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