Three weeks into Donald Trump's war against Iran, the president has still refused to define victory other than to say the war will soon be over. From the moment he launched hostilities, he offered many rationales for the war, choosing among them like he's picking hors d'oeuvres from a buffet at one of his golf resorts: It's about nuclear weapons, it's about terrorism, it's about ballistic missiles. As the media, and the world, press him for explanations, he continues, as Pegah Banihashemi and Paul Poast wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday, to 'careen' between demanding 'unconditional surrender' from Tehran and signaling 'that he might abruptly declare victory and leave.' But Trump did seem to have an overarching goal at the start of the war: regime change. In a video he released during the first night of the attack, he told the Iranian authorities to surrender and called on the Iranian people to rise up against their government. Unfortunately, the regime in Tehran seems to be...
learn more
