When Vice President JD Vance appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday morning, anchor Kristen Welker asked him a simple question: Is the United States now at war with Iran?

In response, Vance said, “We’re not at war with Iran; we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”

This is akin to saying that, in attacking Pearl Harbor, Imperial Japan had merely declared war on America’s warship construction program. Yet it’s notable that Vance felt the need to engage in such contortions — and that President Donald Trump, in his address to the nation last night, went out of his way to emphasize that there were no additional strikes planned.

The Trump administration does not want to admit it has begun a war, because wars have a way of escalating beyond anyone’s control. What we should be worrying about now is not how the US-Iran fighting began, but how it ends.

It is all too easy to see how these initial strikes could escalate into something much bigger — if Iran’s nuclear program remains mostly intact, or if Iran retaliates in a way that forces American counter-escalation.

It’s possible neither occurs, and this stays as limited as currently advertised. Or factors beyond our knowledge — the “unknown unknowns” of the current conflict — could lead to an even greater escalation than anyone is currently predicting. The worst-case scenario, an outright regime change effort akin to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, cannot be entirely ruled out.

I don’t know how bad things will get, or even if things are likely to get worse. But when I watched Trump’s speech, and heard his obviously premature claims that “Iran’s key nuclear facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” I couldn’t help thinking about another speech from over 20 years ago — when, after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, George W. Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and declared “Mission Accomplished.”

The mission hadn’t been accomplished then, as it almost certainly hasn’t been now. We can only hope that the resulting events this time are not a similar kind of catastrophe.

Escalation pathway one: “finishing the job”

We do not know, at present, just how much damage American bombs have done to their targets — Iranian enrichment facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Satellite imagery shows that there are above-ground buildings still standing, belying........

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