President Trump has indicated that the United States is now involved in negotiations with a surviving top, but as-yet-unidentified, Iranian official. 

Press accounts indicate the interlocutor is Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Mohammed Ghalibaf. If true, that would mean the President thinks that perhaps the regime’s most vicious butcher of the Iranian people is a candidate for the so-called “Venezualan solution.”

Put simply, that’s a non-starter. Making a deal that leaves such a monster in charge of Iran would not only be an odious betrayal of that nation’s long-suffering population. It would also be seen throughout the region and among the world’s sharia-supremacists elsewhere as a victory for the jihadists. And it would ensure that the war will continue, almost certainly under less favorable circumstances for us.

Donald Trump has no intention of having such an ignominious defeat as his legacy. 

This is Frank Gaffney.