Donald Trump and his coterie of yes-men and sycophants never troubled themselves to manufacture even a respectable pretext for this war. The neoconservative chorus now sings of humanitarian rescue, but the hymn rings hollow while the president promises to obliterate a civilization and the secretary of defense delivers apocalyptic monologues. A government that cannot be bothered to even lie convincingly about its reasons has usually not thought very carefully about its aims.

None of this redeems the regime in Tehran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has slaughtered its own citizens by the thousands, and any decent person should want it gone. From that wish, the war party constructs a tidy syllogism: the regime is rotten; therefore it will fall; therefore bombs will finish the job. The conclusion does not follow.

History has been remarkably unkind to the theory that air power alone topples governments. Bombing has served as an accelerant in civil wars, giving one faction a decisive advantage, as it did in Yugoslavia and Libya. On its own, however, it has never reliably persuaded a population to rise up or convinced a regime to dissolve. The factor that settles such questions has almost always been the soldier standing on contested ground.

Dresden burned, and the Third Reich fought on. Tokyo burned, and the emperor capitulated only after two cities vanished beneath atomic fire and an invasion force assembled offshore. Even the air-power enthusiasts of the last century, who confidently predicted the bomber would render armies obsolete, lived long enough to watch infantry finish what aircraft alone could not. Tehran is unlikely to break that pattern.

The war’s advocates insist Iran will resemble neither Iraq nor Vietnam. On that prediction, I agree with them. On the reasoning, I do not. Iraq and Vietnam at least supplied a domestic partner through which American power could operate. South Vietnam fielded an army. Northern Iraq possessed the peshmerga of Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union, perhaps a hundred thousand strong. Each controlled meaningful territory before American forces arrived. Iran offers no comparable partner. The United States would enter alone, without any indigenous faction capable of governing the rubble left behind.

Geography only deepens the folly. Iran is a mountainous fortress larger than Germany and Japan combined, terrain that could transform any occupation into a prolonged funeral procession. The absence of a viable opposition also creates a second danger. Without a sovereign authority capable of imposing order, separatist movements would gain momentum while neighboring states inevitably reach across the border.

Iran is barely three-fifths Persian, and successive governments have fought Kurdish, Baluch, and Lur minorities since the days of the Qajar dynasty. Turkey, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Afghanistan encircle the country, and most have demonstrated, at one point or another, an appetite for reshaping borders when opportunity presents itself. Ankara and Baku already speak openly about expanding buffer zones to manage the potential refugee crisis. The president himself has mused that Iran may not emerge from the conflict as a single country. A second Yugoslavia would not simply be an unintended consequence of this policy. It would be its logical outcome.

All of this assumes the more difficult objective can even be accomplished: dismantling the Revolutionary Guard as an institution. Here, the optimists fundamentally misunderstand the organization they seek to destroy. The Baathist states followed a familiar model, with a strongman dominating the political center while projecting secular authority to reassure minorities. Remove the center, and the body collapses.

The Revolutionary Guard operates according to the opposite principle. Its decentralized doctrine disperses autonomous formations across all thirty-one provinces, each capable of continuing the fight even if Tehran can no longer exercise effective command. Level the barracks in the capital, and the institution survives in the provinces. Moscow and Beijing, meanwhile, have every incentive to keep such a conflict alive, bleeding the United States through proxies at relatively little cost to themselves.

The forecast therefore remains uncertain, and that uncertainty is itself the indictment. We can estimate the costs with considerable confidence. The benefits, by contrast, exist largely as aspirations. A government with no plan beyond explosions and optimistic assumptions is not executing a strategy. It is conducting an experiment, and the laboratory is filled with human beings. Hope is a posture, not a plan, and it has never once dismantled a centrifuge.

Experiments of this sort also have a habit of producing monsters no one anticipated. Pol Pot was a marginal figure before Operation Freedom Deal. The Khmer Rouge had barely established itself. The bombing campaign that devastated Cambodia’s countryside emptied villages, displaced millions, and delivered desperate recruits into the hands of extremists. The result became one of the twentieth century’s great slaughters. No one in Washington intended Year Zero. That was precisely the problem. The rise of Pol Pot may not have been foreseeable in its particulars, but the human suffering that made his ascent possible certainly was. Cambodian children are still born with deformities linked to that catastrophe.

The parallel in Iran is already beginning to take shape. Strikes against refineries and water infrastructure promise a harvest of misery that will outlast everyone currently in office. The nuclear agreement had undeniable shortcomings, but a flawed instrument that bought time was preferable to no instrument at all. Time was the one strategic asset available, and it was discarded. The enrichment caps are gone. Gulf economies have sacrificed years of stability. Higher oil prices punish households from Houston to Hamburg. The enriched uranium that supposedly justified this intervention now sits somewhere beyond the reach of international inspectors.

A war begun without an argument has a tendency to end without one as well. What remains is the wreckage, and the bill.