No, what President Trump is doing now vis-à-vis Iran would not be my strategy if I had been elected by the American people to be the commander-in-chief. My take on strategy—I’m a graduate of the Army War College, and they gave me a master’s degree in strategy—is pretty simple. First, you figure out your strategy, and then you beat the living snot out of the enemy until they give up and you attain your objective. Now, I was in the Gulf War, which is the last time we arguably did that on a large scale, and we did it very successfully. Admittedly, I was far in the rear, leading a heavily armed car wash, but I had a good view of what was going on at the VII Corps main command post. Our forces found the enemy and killed them until they stopped fighting. It’s remarkably effective when you do that.

But that’s the operational level. That’s where you’re doing the fighting that enacts the strategy. The strategic level is higher, broader, and more all-encompassing. And one of the things that’s going on here is an overlap between operational and strategic thinking, at least in the public pronouncements. What Donald Trump is announcing as his objectives are arguably operational objectives—destroy their Navy, destroy their air defenses, destroy their nuclear capabilities. Maybe we can argue that those are strategic considerations, but they are at least hybrid ones. The real strategic objectives are the big-picture, long-term stuff. We want an Iranian government that’s not going to keep trying to kill us and to end the undeclared 50-year war they’ve been waging against us, and we only recently started waging back. We also want to stop them from supporting Islamic psychopaths around the globe—hello, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Finally, we would prefer the regime not murder vast numbers of its citizens. And these add up to one strategic goal, but speaking the phrase is like saying the word that the Knights Who Say “Ni!” cannot hear.

That phrase is “regime change.” The proper strategic objective about our enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is “regime change.”

There, I said it. Get over it, pod bros and libertarians. Regime change has gotten a bad rap lately, mostly because when we tried to change regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, we screwed it up in the execution. In large part, this was because we failed to do what I mentioned above: kill enough of the enemy to force them to comply. Instead, we listened to the geniuses from the failed foreign policy elite who have never been in a fistfight in their life and thought it was a much better idea to try to buy off the locals and convert them into people like us. In other words, that meant imposing hamstringing rules of engagement while sending them buckets of cash and gender trainers because the kind of stupid people who ran our foreign policy since World War II were the kind of people who thought that the rest of the world was eager to share the same gooey political ideology as a Santa Monica wine woman.

They forgot that war, at least the military aspect, is about inflicting massive violence until the other guy gives up. And, as Clausewitz observed, war is inherently a political act. It aims to affect politics; war itself is politics by other means. And there’s nothing more political than changing a regime. In fact, regime change is a traditional way to end wars, as are negotiations. Either make a deal or go in, cut the leader’s head off, and put in a leader you can live with. That’s what the Romans did. And the Romans lasted for a while, until they started channeling the Democrats and allowing foreigners to come in and destroy their feminized nation, but that’s a whole other thing.

As noted, my preference would be to go in and pound the Iranian mullahs and their minions into smoking rubble. We should certainly let (and, in fact, encourage) Israel do that with Hezbollah—the fact that these sociopaths have American blood........

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