Important Things to Understand About the War With Iran

This was not an emergency military action based on new circumstances. There are people in our government who have always wanted a war with Iran, and they’ve very recently gotten their way. There is a powerful foreign policy establishment in D.C. Through consistent pressure and sheer repetition, they tend to get the wars they want, no matter how unpopular or unwise.

For those of us whose historical memory extends beyond the most recent news cycle, this latest war is just an example of “the foreign policy establishment got its way.” Dick Cheney was pushing this hard in 2007. The US public had our hands full with Iraq at the time and had no appetite for this. We weren’t about to fall for the trick that “We’re really at war with (changes one letter in country’s name).” My private joke on the matter, given Cheney’s recent death, is that “Dick Cheney has a force ghost, and it’s really persuasive.” But Cheney was just the latest torch carrier for a long-running thread in US foreign policy. Bush’s speechwriter David Frum included Iran in the “axis of evil”, as presented in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. This was a “WTF” moment for many observers who had no particular quarrel with Iran. It was clear that in the wake of 9/11, foreign policy hawks were preying on the ignorance of American voters who couldn’t tell one middle eastern country from another. Netanyahu has been claiming for over 30 years that Iran was on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon, obviously as a pretext for pulling the US into a war with them.

The prospect of a nuclear armed Iran is presented as an existential threat. In the hawk’s hypothetical, they aren’t constrained by mutually assured destruction, as are all other nations. In their presentation nuclear Iran will definitely bomb Israel and probably the United States. These scenarios are totally implausible and it’s utterly disingenuous to entertain them seriously. It’s pure fear-mongering. The real motivating factor here is that a nuclear armed Iran would change the balance of power in the middle east. That’s not an existential threat, but this drives Israeli and American hawks nuts. Iran wouldn’t dare to use their nuclear arsenal in anger. It wouldn’t break the 80-year hiatus on the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. But the mere threat that it could do so would limit the options of hostile regimes (again, the US and Israel). We’re seeing what Iran is willing to do with conventional weapons. Missile and drone attacks have not lead to overwhelming casualties, but they have been a significant limitation to our operations in the region. If they had nuclear weapons and the means to deploy them, they could menace their neighbors in this fashion without a serious threat of reprisal. That’s a problem if you insist on complete American hegemony in the Middle East.

Iran was happy with its policy of latent deterrence. It did not want a nuclear weapon, and it said so. We don’t have to take their word for it, either. It’s not like being a nuclear state is pure upside. Iran didn’t want to bear the burden of being a nuclear state. It didn’t want the headache and the international sanctions that come from being a pariah state. What it was actually doing was saying to the world, “See, we could build a bomb if we undertook the last few engineering steps. Don’t tempt us.” We should have stuck with this uneasy peace. Our repeated bombings have increased the risk that they will acquire nuclear weapons for real. I’m a peace loving anti-war person, but if a much larger nation repeatedly bombed my country I would be demanding an acceleration of our nuclear program. I’d be desperate to acquire any deterrent we could get our hands on, any way to send the message, “You can’t just bomb us at will.” I’d be thinking this even if I lived under an evil government run by corrupt theocrats.

None of this is meant as a moral defense of Iran’s leadership, but it’s foolish to ignore their perspective. To explain is not to forgive. Scott Horton said it well in a recent interview with Joe Rogan. He analogizes the US surprise attack on Iran in February 2026 to Pearl Harbor, supposing Iran had sunk our navy and killed thousands of our soldiers and sailors:

But also, they wiped out schools full of 180 little girls, the children of those sailors who drowned at Pearl Harbor. Oh, and also they killed FDR that same day too. Oh, and also as a Catholic country, and he's also the Pope. Imagine how we would react to that. Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be. I'll tell you what our story of World War II would be. It would be that we kept nuking them till they were all dead, is what our story of World War II would be if that's how they had done us at Pearl Harbor. It's just somehow we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should.

You can hate Iran’s leadership and still understand this. You can even be totally indifferent to the deaths and impoverishment of Iranian civilians and still understand this. Obtuse commentators speak in the language of GI Joe morality when a western-style democracy wages war on a pre-enlightenment dictatorship, as if the nation’s governments were pure embodiments of their people. Iranians are the bad guys in this framing and we (the US or Israel) are the good guys. I even hear “sophisticated” journalists, politicians, and policy analysts drift into this kind of language. If your weapons are obliterating innocent people, then you simultaneously need righteous propaganda to obliterate their personhood. Otherwise those innocent deaths would impugn your military adventures and call into question your legitimacy. This deployment of moral language is really warfare by other means. It clears away pesky obstructions that would limit military tactics, since a truly moral military is scrupulous about avoiding civilian casualties.