MORNING GLORY: I asked Trump if he was prepared to remove Iran’s new leaders

Trump's answer to that question was the right one, even if it drove the cable news panels crazy for an hour. "I know where they are" is not a policy paper, and it shouldn't be. The IRGC has spent forty years learning how Washington telegraphs its punches, and every administration that announced its intentions in advance ended up negotiating with an enemy that had already adjusted. Keeping the regime's remaining commanders guessing about what happens next is not evasion. It's leverage.

The more interesting part of this story is the bit further down, the note from analysts about watching for splits within Iran's security forces. That's the real ballgame. Regimes don't usually fall because a foreign leader announces a decapitation strategy on the record. They fall, or bend, when the people holding the guns start wondering if they're on the losing side. If there's daylight opening up inside the IRGC's command structure right now, that's worth ten public threats from any American president.

We'd also point out the obvious: Trump is the only recent president who has actually had Iranian commanders removed and then absorbed the domestic screaming that followed. Soleimani is dead because he made that call once already. So when he says he knows where the rest of them are, that's not campaign talk. It's a résumé line, and Tehran knows it.

None of this means the smart move is another strike tomorrow. Restraint paired with credible capability is usually more destabilizing to a regime than noise. What matters is that the people making decisions in Tehran believe the threat is real and that nobody in Washington is going to hand them a script for how to survive it.