Trump Has No Idea How to End the War With Iran

In September 1996, I visited Tehran for the first time. I stayed at the Homa Hotel, formerly a Sheraton. I wrote at the time that fixed above the door in the lobby was a sign that read, in English, “Down with U.S.A.” As I pondered that sign, I remember thinking something like: Wow, that’s not graffiti! That’s firmly attached. That won’t come down easily.

The late 1990s were a fleeting moment of openness in Iran, which is how I got a visa. I was hopeful that the obvious quest then of many of Iran’s young people to join the world economy would eventually triumph over its leaders who had fixed those words into the wall. It didn’t happen. The words were too deeply embedded.

Now, we’re more than a week into the war with Iran launched by President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and the biggest question I have is this: What if the necessary is impossible? What if the transformation of Iran is so much more important than the war’s critics admit, but so much more difficult than the war’s designers understand?