Winning in Iran

I don't see the point of talking about "unconditional surrender"--we can't enforce that without boots on the ground and everybody knows we can't do that (Data republican has numbers).

My record at prediction isn't good, so don't take this as prophecy, but at a guess, since politics is the art of the possible and Iran's mullahs invested the IRCG with a lot of their enforcement power, then if there is "regime change" the IRCG will play some role. Who has the arms and organization to stamp them out?

That would imply that the new government wouldn't be entirely satisfactory to us, since it would include a faction that still wants regional domination (and maybe to "immanentize the eschaton" too), and not be altogether stable either.

That's almost certainly still better than the previous situation. We can't command nice clear-cut victories and transformations all the time; or even most of the time. Even World War II -- we had lots of boots on the ground and "unconditional surrenders," and we still had to make some very messy compromises at the end of it: not least with the USSR, but also with the Germans and Japanese.

I sometimes think it's safer to fight for interests rather than ideals. Interests you can compromise, if the matter is not existential: "We need X but the price is too high so we'll settle for Y, at least for the next decade"; but ideals sometimes demand more dedication.