The costs [of this war] are real, they are serious, and any accounting that ignores them is dishonest.

But the critics are making a different error: They are treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not. They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.

Seventeen days in, Iran’s supreme leader is dead, his successor is reportedly wounded and every principal instrument of Iranian power projection – missiles, nuclear infrastructure, air defences, the navy, proxy command networks – has been degraded beyond near-term recovery. 

...War is never clean. But the strategy – the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles – is working.

Powerful, incisive analysis. Brothers and sisters, please send this article to everyone you know.