This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Signs are that the month-long US-Israel military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran is drawing to a close.

US President Donald Trump, set to address the American people on Wednesday night, specified on Tuesday that it was “coming to an end,” whether or not there is a deal with the Iranian leadership. Trump also declared that Iran’s surviving 450-kilogram stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium — constituting its swiftest path to the bomb — no longer concerned him at all, since it was essentially inaccessible, “so deeply buried it’s going to be very hard for anybody” to reach it.

His vice president, JD Vance, remarked at the weekend that “you could make a good argument we’ve accomplished all of our military objectives.”

The Times of Israel reported on Monday that Israel’s defense establishment had entered what it is calling the “completion phase” of its war goals — meaning, wrote our military reporter Emanuel Fabian, that “it believes it has largely achieved its objectives of degrading Iran’s military capabilities and creating the conditions for the Iranian regime to fall.”

And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a gung-ho recorded speech to Israelis on Tuesday night, proclaimed that, having removed the “immediate threat” of Iran attaining a nuclear weapon and tens of thousands of ballistic missiles last June, the current campaign has seen the US and Israel “smashing the industrial capability of the regime to produce these tools of destruction.”

Of course, Trump being Trump, nothing is certain. The US president also said as recently as Monday that if no deal was reached with the regime, then the US would move ahead with “blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

If he is disorienting us, he’s hopefully doing a great deal more than that to our enemies.

If he is disorienting us, he’s hopefully doing a great deal more than that to our enemies.

If he is disorienting us, he’s hopefully doing a great deal more than that to our enemies.

But if this campaign is indeed about to end, the war against the world-endangering Islamic Republic is emphatically not over. Its core goals have not been achieved. And Israel remains on the front line, acutely threatened.

For all that Trump has maintained in recent days that regime change has taken place in Iran, because its hierarchy has been so decimated as to bear no resemblance to the leadership ranks of a month ago, the fact is that the Islamic Republic’s declared ideological and territorial goals have not deviated, and that the very “top man” with whom Trump says he has been interacting, Mohammad Ghalibaf, is every ounce a regime hardliner.

Ghalibaf is a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander directly involved in the murderous suppression of domestic opposition, and a “Death to America” cheerleader from his prominent seat as speaker of the........

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