HOW IT STARTED.

Both television commentator Laura Ingraham and radio commentators Clay Travis and Buck Sexton have commended "How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran," which Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman filed in New York's Times.  Yes, that's a lot of black swans in flight at once, and here's why.

This account of how Mr. Trump took the United States into war is drawn from reporting for a forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” It reveals how the deliberations inside the administration highlighted the president’s instincts, his inner circle’s fractures and the way he runs the White House. It draws on extensive interviews conducted on the condition of anonymity to recount internal discussions and sensitive issues.

The reporting underscores how closely Mr. Trump’s hawkish thinking aligned with Mr. Netanyahu’s over many months, more so than even some of the president’s key advisers recognized. Their close association has been an enduring feature across two administrations, and that dynamic — however fraught at times — has fueled intense criticism and suspicion on both the left and the right of American politics.

Yes, there's a lot of the predictable, antagonistic ankle-biting in that passage.  Read on:

In the Situation Room on Feb. 11, Mr. Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.

At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.

No, those hopes have not, six weeks in, proven out.

In that passage, though, note how the strategic aims of Israel and the United States and now the Gulf Arab countries align, but are not congruent.  That becomes clear as the planning progressed.

The intelligence officials had deep expertise in U.S. military capabilities, and they knew the Iranian system and its players inside out. They had broken down Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation into four parts. First was decapitation — killing the ayatollah. Second was crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors. Third was a popular uprising inside Iran. And fourth was regime change, with a secular leader installed to govern the country.

The U.S. officials assessed that the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s pitch, which included the possibility of the Kurds mounting a ground invasion of Iran, were detached from reality.

When Mr. Trump joined the meeting, Mr. Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment. The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios: “farcical.”

Achieving the first two objectives, though, appealed to Our President.

The president then turned to General Caine. “General, what do you think?”

General Caine replied: “Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”

Mr. Trump quickly weighed the assessment. Regime change, he said, would be “their problem.” It was unclear whether he was referring to the Israelis or the Iranian people. But the bottom line was that his decision on whether to go to war against Iran would not hinge on whether Parts 3 and 4 of Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation were achievable.

Mr. Trump appeared to remain very interested in accomplishing Parts 1 and 2: killing the ayatollah and Iran’s top leaders and dismantling the Iranian military.

General Caine — the man Mr. Trump liked to refer to as “Razin’ Caine” — had impressed the president years earlier by telling him the Islamic State could be defeated far more quickly than others had projected. Mr. Trump rewarded that confidence by elevating the general, who had been an Air Force fighter pilot, to be his top military adviser. General Caine was not a political loyalist, and he had serious concerns about a war with Iran. But he was very cautious in the way he presented his views to the president.

As the small team of advisers who were looped into the plans deliberated over the following days, General Caine shared with Mr. Trump and others the alarming military assessment that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry, including missile interceptors, whose supply had been strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel. General Caine saw no clear path to quickly replenishing these stockpiles.

He also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran blocking it. Mr. Trump had dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that. The president appeared to think it would be a very quick war — an impression that had been reinforced by the tepid response to the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

The popular uprising and the Strait remain sticking points today.  The mullahs' terrorist state has been annoying Israel and the United States and the Gulf Arab countries for years.

Of all the foreign policy challenges Mr. Trump had confronted across two presidencies, Iran stood apart. He regarded it as a uniquely dangerous adversary and was willing to take great risks to hinder the regime’s ability to wage war or to acquire a nuclear weapon. Furthermore, Mr. Netanyahu’s pitch had dovetailed with Mr. Trump’s desire to dismantle the Iranian theocracy, which had seized power in 1979, when Mr. Trump was 32. It had been a thorn in the side of the United States ever since.

Now, he could become the first president since the clerical leadership took over 47 years ago to pull off regime change in Iran. Usually unmentioned but always in the background was the added motivation that Iran had plotted to kill Mr. Trump as revenge over the assassination in January 2020 of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who was seen in the United States as a driving force behind an Iranian campaign of international terrorism.

Personal animus might be secondary to the permanent interests of the United States, and all evidence suggests that a joint operation was being planned long before allied intelligence services learned of a meeting of senior Iranian officials.

In the final days of February, the Americans and the Israelis discussed a piece of new intelligence that would significantly accelerate their timeline. The ayatollah would be meeting above ground with other top officials of the regime, in broad daylight and wide open for an air attack. It was a fleeting chance to strike at the heart of Iran’s leadership, the kind of target that might not present itself again.

Mr. Trump gave Iran another chance to come to a deal that would block its path to nuclear weapons. The diplomacy also gave the United States extra time to move military assets to the Middle East.

The president had effectively made up his mind weeks earlier, several of his advisers said. But he had not yet decided exactly when. Now, Mr. Netanyahu urged him to move fast.

And so it began, although as is always the case with war, there have been a number of surprises.