Iran’s Islamic Republic 2.0 is coming — and it won’t be pretty

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/12/trump-iran-regime-attack-forever-war/

There will probably be some sort of ceasefire, maybe soon. Tanker traffic will resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Bombing by U.S. B-52s and B-2s will stop. Iran and its proxies will refrain from drone attacks across the Persian Gulf. Tehran may haggle over ceasefire conditions, but that won’t matter much because its military power has mostly been destroyed — at least for now.

If there’s one lesson America and Israel should have learned in recent decades, it’s that military success doesn’t usually translate to political victory — in Gaza, Afghanistan or, now, Iran. The adversary keeps coming back. The Israelis have learned that they have to keep “mowing the grass,” the harsh phrase they use for the cycle of recurring violence. America, after avoiding an all-out clash with Iran for 47 years, may now be caught in a similar cycle.

But the regime survives. It has taken America’s best punch, and it’s still standing. Tiers of senior military, intelligence and political leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. There’s no sign of a popular uprising. The cadres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hide among piles of rubble, but they haven’t been eliminated.

I truly wish that “regime change” were possible in Iran. This dreadful government has brought misery to its people and its neighbors and deserves to go. But that process is hard to imagine for hard-line intelligence experts in the United States and abroad who have been studying the mullahs for decades. “I don’t think we are going to break their will,” fears one senior Gulf official who passionately opposes the regime. “They will rebuild as long as they’re alive.