Don’t Ask How This War Ends

During the 2003 Iraq War, then–Major General David Petraeus famously said to the journalist and historian Rick Atkinson, “Tell me how this ends.” It is the obvious query to be posed about the conflict with Iran, but it requires a different answer.

In the middle of a war, few people are inclined to take the longest view of its origins.

The implications of the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina, in 1908, were probably of little interest to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, or General John J.

Pershing in 1917.

But the questions of when and why a war began are essential to understanding it.

In the case of the Iran war, we must see the conflict not as a war unto itself but rather as the latest campaign in a war that has gone on since the 1979 Iranian revolution, conducted for the most part with covert warfare, naval skirmishes, and raids.

The launch of Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025, in which the U.S. targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, marked a new phase.

The war has been fought by the United States, Israel, and most of the Persian Gulf’s Sunni monarchies against a regime that combines an unappeasable anti-Western ideology and exterminationist hatred of Israel with a desire to assert old Persian imperial reach.

The most important facts of the conflict are its deep historical and religious roots, and the virtual absence of any possibility of a real reconciliation or lasting peacemaking, although truces and suspensions of violence have occurred and will again.

The war will not end until the Islamic Republic of Iran collapses or undergoes some transformation; neither outcome is predictable, and neither may happen in the next few months or years.

And if either occurs, it will probably come as a surprise.

That glum assessment is only one part of the picture, however.

The act of fighting a war transforms many things—it throws a chessboard up in the air, and when the board lands, the pieces are in different places; even the rules of the game may have changed.

The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was followed by half a dozen major pulses of violence.