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Donald Trump may be already declaring victory in Iran and imagining a quick exit, but let’s not miss the newly installed ​Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei telling Iranians about “avenging the blood of your martyrs” as the death toll rises. As Nayyera Haq told me, the 56-year-old Khameini “blames the United States for the deaths of his mother, his father, his wife, his son, his sister, his brother-in-law and his nephew. Now, if that’s not a vengeance main character storyline, I don’t know what is.”

I spoke with Nayyera, who served as a senior advisor in the State Department and the White House during the Obama presidency, about the lack of planning, the failure to game out potential consequences, the general indifference by Trump and his operatives to the human cost—and the lying about the on-the-ground reality. “What makes this most dangerous is there’s no sense of responsibility for Trump in this war other than making it work for Trump,” Haq said. “He doesn’t care about the reality on the ground—human costs, human suffering—that’s not who he is.”

How long will this war go on, even as the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz causes a growing oil crisis and the death toll mounts? “I think we’re looking at months,” Nayyera predicts.