I tried chess once, long enough to learn the names of the pieces but not long enough to learn patience. The board demanded a kind of stillness I did not have. And perhaps still do not.

What I remember is this: everything can be taken.

The queen goes. The bishops disappear along their diagonals. Knights fall in awkward places. Rooks are traded like currency. Even the pawns, lined up like conscripts, move forward knowing exactly how it ends for most of them.

All of them are expendable. That, if you’re paying attention, is the first lesson the game teaches without saying it out loud.

The king is the exception. He is never taken. Cornered, yes. Stripped of options, certainly. But not removed. The game ends before that happens, as if there is some quiet agreement that the person at the center must survive the defeat.

Chess imagines war as something orderly. Loss without collapse. Power without annihilation. It is a comforting fiction.

There was a time when real wars tried, at least in posture, to resemble that fiction. Officers spoke of honor with a straight face. Armies moved in lines that could be read from a distance. The men giving orders made themselves visible — on horseback, elevated, unmistakable.

In the early years of the American Civil War, there lingered a certain discomfort with the idea of deliberately picking off those men. Not quite a rule, not even a consensus, but a hesitation.

Remove the head, and what follows might not be victory but something closer to chaos. An army without direction is not necessarily defeated; it can become less predictable, less containable.

War, in that telling, was meant to end with the enemy subdued, not unmade. It is a neat theory. It did not last.

Albert Sidney Johnston bled out at Shiloh in 1862, a loss felt not because he had been spared, but because he had not. John Sedgwick looked out at distant enemy lines and dismissed the threat. “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” he said, just before they did.

Then, Confederate stalwart Stonewall Jackson survived the enemy long enough to be brought down by his own side, fatally shot in the confusion of darkness and the frayed nerves of a sentry.

So much for the idea that some pieces are too important to be removed. If anything, the opposite has proven true. The more visible the piece, the more valuable the shot.

Now comes Iran.

A joint US-Israeli strike had taken out the one figure who, in theory, should have ended the game — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — along with a tier of men built to think, decide, and command.

By the logic of chess, that is a checkmate. It isn’t.

Because Iran is not arranged like a chessboard but like a system designed to absorb loss. Iran’s history is less romance than repetition: conquered by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, overrun by Arab armies, then shattered by Mongol invasions that leveled cities and killed millions.

Empires have broken Iran, occupied it, and reshaped it. Yet none have managed to make it stay broken for long. Khamenei is dead, but so what?

Decapitation promises clarity — a single strike, a clean end. Reality rarely cooperates. Remove the head, and you risk hardening the body. Martyrdom replaces authority. Successors emerge, often less cautious, more ideological, and with fewer incentives to step back.

And then there is reciprocity. Once the line is crossed, it does not stay one-sided. Leaders like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and America’s Donald Trump become fair game everywhere. Tit for tat.

So the move to kill Khamenei and his successors is legal; perhaps even tempting. But as with all such moves, the question is not whether it can be done — but whether it actually wins the game.

What was Trump saying? A four-week war? He’s not one to learn from history if it slaps him in the face.