By now, it's over a week since we launched our war on Iran in conjunction with Israel and we still don't know for sure why we are at war; or depending on which GOP Congressman you ask, we don't know what is a war anymore. Given the double-, triple- and quaduple-speak on this war that is not a war, I think we now have more clarity on what is a catch in the NFL than what exactly constitutes a war. But we know, if we needed any reminding, of just how terrible the price of war is.
This "not war" tells us one thing - more than one terrible thing can be true at the same time and two wrongs do not make a right. Like elephants all the way down, each atrocity and justification of this war is based on an earlier event without ending. But whether this war was triggered forty years ago by the events in Lebanon or in the toppling of the Shah's corrupt and repressive regime, certain facts are undeniable. The current Iranian government is terrible, a violent, theocratic group of men who justify their actions through divine mandate (setting aside the uncomfortable parallels to our own current government) and their religious leader gets no sympathy from me. This is after all a man who has sent violent militias into the streets to attack and murder women for simply asking to be free; not even really free, but simply to be treated as equals to their brothers. This is a vile man who has had no qualms against killing non-Muslims and Muslims who do not share his exact beliefs, who has called for the wiping out of Jews, who has calmly called for death and destruction on his enemies.
And yet, murdering him is not justified, no matter how our own corrupt, pedophile protecting government spins it. For Israel, the logic and aims are simpler - they want to simply cripple Iran and do not care nor even pretend to care about what comes after and will happily keep bombing the country to keep it in chaos and misery. This is at least a straightforward plan, no matter how horrible. But we in the United States like to think we are the guys in the white hats, we are the good guys who ride into protect the weak against the baddies. And nothing in this war is justified, much less coherent or even slightly sensible. It's worth noting that Saddam Hussein, our previous favorite villain (and our good friend before that) did not, as far as I know, attempt to actually kill Iran's leaders directly. Granted, the religious leader of Iran is not exactly the head of state, but is certainly the leader of the country under their constitution and murdering him is arguably a violation of the Geneva conventions. The only country that has tried this act openly is Russia, when they sent commandos with the specific aim of capturing or killing Ukraine's President Zelensky - the shining city on the hill is the same as the Evil Empire, it seems.
But that crime apart, think for a moment about what we are doing to Iran. We struck them in the middle of diplomatic negotiations, when Iran had signaled that progress was being made. Leaving aside that it was our stupidity that destroyed the previous agreement ten years ago, to launch a surprise attack in the middle of negotiations is like the Red Wedding. It makes for dramatic story, for terms like "decapitation of the government" but it is a breach of all diplomatic norms and signals that we don't want peace and never really wanted peace. It gives adversaries no incentive to negotiate since we do not talk in good faith and will use the moment to launch a surprise attack on them. In 1991, in the first Gulf War, President Bush waited till talks had ended without result, till the deadlines for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait had passed, before starting the war. Over time, I've come to view that war much differently, but it was backed by UN resolutions, clear legal demands and deadlines and Iraq had no doubts that the attack was coming if the deadline passed. On the other hand in the last eight months, we have twice launched illegal, surprise attacks on Iran, both times in the middle of negotiations, as Iran's Foreign Minister observed, and we should not wonder that he refused to be fooled a third time. He might have, if he was a student of history, pointed out that we have a sad history extending all the way back to 1837 and the Second Seminole War, when we imprisoned the Seminole leader Osceola when he came to talks under a flag of truce. I guess we now cheer the Tywin Lannisters of this world but we should not wonder that the Iranian government, like the North, remembers.
The greater tragedy is that we don't even execute our Red Wedding effectively or pause to ask if our tactics will work. Filled with hubris that Venezuela did not fight back when we illegally kidnapped their president (another corrupt and horrible leader, much like our own), we blithely expected Iran to capitulate when we attacked them. But Iran has a more sophisticated and organic government, and while very likely enjoying minority support from its people, it is still their government. No country likes to be attacked by a foreign power, no matter how much they hate their own government, and the Iranian government controls the narrative within its borders every bit as effectively as the US media self censures itself to ensure that the people of each country know only what the government wants us to know. Worse yet, we sat on our hands for the past few months and allowed the Iranian government to brutally repress a popular uprising - estimates are that over five thousand protestors may have been killed, thousands more imprisoned. We, to our eternal shame, encouraged them to come out in the streets but we did absolutely nothing to actually stop their government massacring them. Perhaps our government was a little distracted occupying and crushing Minneapolis to worry about Iranian protestors. Whatever our reasons, we allowed the most pro-Western part of the Iranian population to be crushed, and the has incredibly uncomfortable parallels to the Soviet inaction at the Warsaw Uprising on 1944. We are either clueless about how the world works, totally disinterested in what comes after the war or actively hoping to destroy the country totally and none of those options are comforting; the thought that it is actually a combination of all three is truly terrifying.
The situation above is rendered so much worse when it is obvious that our "ally" Israel has no intention of ending this war without destroying Iran, so much so that they have promised that they will kill any leader chosen to replace the previous religious state. This makes it clear that Israel has no interest in ending the war except on its absolutist terms but simultaneously removes any incentive for Iran to negotiate an end to the war. The strange thing is that the Iranian government, for all its apocalyptic talk and bombast, has always been pragmatic and committed to remaining in power. It is noteworthy that their most ruthless action is aimed at its own citizens when they dare challenge the theocratic state. They responded to the assassination of their famed Guards commander by the US in 2020 with a strike that seemed almost calibrated in agreement with the US to claim retaliation without drawing any further escalation (the injuries to US soldiers were no joke but in objective terms, Iran accepted the loss of a key general with no real revenge beyond saving face). Likewise, in the attacks on their nuclear facilities last summer, they launched retaliation strikes that allowed them to claim they had struck back without escalating the war. In the past, they have stood by while their allies, Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah, have faced the full force of the Israeli army. Incidentally, it is likely erroneous to call any of these three proxies of Iran despite its wide use, as time and again they have shown that they have a loose alliance built on shared interests but no clear understanding of mutual defense. And Iran has showed over and over that they will tiptoe to the line buy not cross it, knowing that there are boundaries that could trigger the collapse of their nation.
It is this pragmatic love of power that should have been the most effective way to negotiate with Iran. Our common refrain, echoed and amplified by Israel, is that Iran cannot be permitted to have nuclear weapons. There is much to say about the nuclear monopoly that can wait for another day but instead I shall just ask the key question: would Iran launch nuclear weapons at Israel the moment they had them? This is the fear we use to justify our position and actions, but I wonder if it is no more than self-serving fabrications. We can never know for sure, but its worth noting a few points. As I noted, the Iranian regime wants to survive and they know that any attack on Israel would draw equally catastrophic destruction upon them. We called the Soviets nihilistic, claimed that they were an evil empire but the certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction kept the superpowers from ever going to war directly against each other for the last eighty years. The same holds true of China, and even nations that supposedly hate each other like India and Pakistan have refrained from allowing their wars to flare past a certain point. The greater danger, in fact, is that Pakistan may collapse as a nation state, leaving its atomic weapons under the control of a non-state, true nihilist. North Korea, another state given to heated and extreme bombast, has not really moved past its typical behavior even after possibly having its own nuclear weapons. On the other side, we see two nations that abandoned their nuclear weapons and suffered - Libya saw its leader overthrown and executed and is now the epitome of a failed nation, split between warring factions, while Ukraine saw Russia invade and seize a fifth of its territory. In the eight decades since the mushroom cloud changed our perceptions forever, only one nation has ever used nuclear weapons, and used them not in defense of itself, but as a demonstration of its power to destroy. When we warn that Iran will launch nuclear weapons to destroy Israel (and for some reason, Europe), we are actually saying that they will behave like us.
That is the war of today in a nutshell - unjustified, unprovoked and with no plan for the aftermath nor any clear or achievable end, with execution that leaves no reason for Iran to make peace. We frame the attacks on international shipping, on neighboring states, on airports and oil terminals as proof of Iran's perfidy when the truth is much more nuanced. We are supporting our attacks from bases across the West Asian theater, defensive if not always direct offense and threatening the total destruction of the Iranian state. It should not surprise that Iran is seeking to pressure us with anything and everything in their arsenal given that they have nothing to lose, if they believe us. They have not attacked Persian Gulf shipping on this scale since the end of Iran-Iraq war knowing that its a form of MAD but we have told them that we are going to destroy them no matter what. And by way of proving it to them, we have murdered their leaders, killed over a hundred and fifty school girls and gloated about the sinking of a possibly unarmed naval ship over a thousand miles from the theater. And since we have also claimed that we are not at war, then we have absolutely no reason for attacking that ship. But then again, we had no reason to kill nearly two hundred schoolgirls except to satisfy our own bloodlust and that tragedy will play out more and move in this non war.
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