We must crush Iran now so it cant come back and spread terror

A great scholar of the Islamic world — Bernard Lewis — was once asked the main difference between the Islamist and Western mind.He replied that whereas we in the West think in two-year electoral cycles — four years at most — the Islamist mind sees a decade as the very shortest measure of time.I was reminded of that comment this week as a tentative ceasefire came into effect in the Middle East.It is too early to know whether the latest ceasefire will hold.

But it is early enough to know that it should not.Not if America is going to achieve any of its objectives in the region.One of the first stated objectives of this war has been the overthrow of the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran.

That objective has not been achieved.It is true that one of the first strikes of this war killed the Ayatollah Khamenei.

But his foul Islamic regime, with its terrorist armies at home and abroad, remains in power.It is still able to terrorize the people of Iran, the region and indeed the world.The historic joint US-Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program has undoubtedly set that nuclear program back massively.

But it has not completely destroyed it.All parties agree that the regime in Tehran still has stockpiles of enriched uranium.And while it looks like the majority of Iran’s stockpiles of ballistic missiles have been decimated, they have not been wiped out entirely.In other words — at present, the revolutionary government in Iran lives to fight another day.Worst it appears to have come out of this latest ceasefire arrangement in the belief that it can shake the Straits of Hormuz like a fund-raising tin — toll-charging any international container that it “permits” to travel through that waterway.Which brings me back to that question of objectives and timescales.At home in America, there are some people who seem intent on portraying the extraordinary successes of this war as failures.

Certain Democrats who would ordinarily rail against a totalitarian...