The Israeli-American air campaign against Iran will have profound global repercussions. What those repercussions will be depends on two crucial factors. First, will the bombing campaign remove the Shi’ite Islamist regime from power? We do not yet know if the campaign can accomplish that ambitious goal without foreign troops on the ground. If the US and Israel can do that, it would be an unprecedented achievement.

Second, if the Islamists are removed, will the successor regime be stable and effective? Will it be able to control the streets and countryside, prevent successful breakaway regional movements, and begin the arduous process of rebuilding the country? Can the factions currently opposing the old regime join in supporting a new one or will they fracture? Could a new regime actually govern the country? Or will it be tied down in internal struggles over who will govern?

An even worse prospect is civil war or a deadly, ongoing confrontation with local terrorists. That kind of chaos would be catastrophic for the long-suffering people of Iran. And it would be catastrophic for the Trump administration, which promised no long-term foreign entanglements.

No one can answer these questions after only a few days of bombing, however successful the opening strikes have been. Those strikes killed nearly all the regime’s senior leadership. They wiped out Iran’s command-and-control structure, a vital prop of the regime. Future American and Israeli bombs will eliminate the regime’s remaining missile and naval assets, as well as the nuclear program it was trying to rebuild. Less certain is whether it can eliminate the regime’s lethal apparatus for suppressing domestic opposition.

Already the regime’s capacity to fund its terror proxies across the region has been destroyed. This bombing campaign and the one several months ago, together with tough economic sanctions, ensured that. What is still unclear, though, is whether the campaign destroyed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ instruments of repression. Those thugs are certainly willing to keep killing and imprisoning dissidents. But are they able? We will learn over the next few days.

The regime’s remnants still have two lingering advantages. First, they are far better armed than their civilian opponents. Second, they do not face an invading army of ground troops,........

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