In 1989, The Offspring released their self titled album. On it is a song called Tehran:

In your plane in the blue sky
You roam again
Words that echo in your mind
Make your heart beat faster
This is no Vietnam
We will win in Iran

The strikes in Iran are morally repugnant. They are almost certainly illegal by the standards of national and international law. The chances they achieve any political aim apart from the death of certain individuals are vanishingly small.

I condemn this in the strongest possible terms, but this reaction is not only based on what we're doing, but why and how.

I'll start by steel manning the case for striking Iran. I'm not going to entertain some kind of nation building via aerial bombardment fantasy, but I'll assume that the strikes will accomplish an optimistic version of their goals, whatever those are (more on that later). Afterward, I hope you're confident that the strongest versions of their justifications are pathetically inadequate.

By far the strongest justification for the attack is Iran's consistent backing of groups which wage low level warfare in the region. This includes Hezbollah which strikes inside Israel from Lebanon, the PIJ in Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen, as well as paramilitary groups in Syria and Bahrain. These groups antagonize governments of varying legitimacy and undermine stability in the region.

Stability in this context is often a euphemism for "populated by regimes favorable to the United States", but eg. the Houthis have been a persistent threat to international shipping, interrupting not only regional but world trade. These skirmishes kill real people and destroy real lives, so I'm not going to minimize them.

Additional reasoning includes Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and Iran's recent crackdown on peaceful protesters. I don't find these convincing. This isn't to say that I am in favor of either of these outcomes, but I don't think these are legitimate grounds for a unilateral offensive strike.

There are ethical reasons why I think these aren't convincing, but there are also practical ones. The idea that a nuclear power will attack a non-nuclear power for trying to develop nukes creates a perverse system of incentives which guarantees broad nuclear proliferation. After all, why must Ukraine suffer continuous indignity and attrition while a pariah like North Korea can threaten its neighbors unmolested?

Of course, we already had a comprehensive deal in place to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran also had a leader who had condemned the pursuit of nuclear weapons. You may not subscribe to that deal's efficacy, you may not believe in the sincerity of the anti-nuclear fatwa, but the fact remains that Trump blew up both the deal and the leader.

As is increasingly the case, the messaging from both Russia and the US seems both aligned and clear. If you don't have nukes, you had better get some. Broad nuclear proliferation ensures that we will someday see another non-test nuclear detonation. If we're lucky, it will be an accident far away from a populated area, and if we're unlucky, we will see a civilizational collapse that will make the end of the bronze age look like the renaissance. Having recently had the somber experience of visiting the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, this possibility is harrowing in a freshly visceral way to me.

Such a sharp and personal reaction to the industrial slaughter of humanity is not uncommon. After the horrors of WWI, president Wilson attempted to establish an international order that could mediate and prevent such wars in the future. As part of this push for internationalism, the Geneva Protocol was established in 1925 banning the first-strike use of Chemical weapons.

The Geneva Protocol is distinct from the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of soldiers and prisoners of war. Those were a reaction to the horrors of WWII. Since the League of Nations had failed and in its wake arrived another great war, there was a need for a new international order. The result was the establishment of the crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing and of the United Nations, an international deliberative body whose ultimate goal is to prevent these crimes from happening in the future. This is what we mean by never again.

This may come as a surprise to American readers, but the UN is actually generally quite popular, even in the US. It is broadly perceived as a flawed but necessary organization, and while many Americans may see it is as a do-nothing body with no fangs, it's participated in over 70 peacekeeping missions since its founding.

It's under this framework of international consensus that policing the crime of killing one's own civilians by force derives its legitimacy. Otherwise, what is war but a denial of sovereignty?

We used to know this. In 2003, Colin Powell inexorably soiled his legacy at the UN Security Council in an attempt to convince them that Iraq was in violation of international statutes against the development of chemical weapons. When that failed, the Bush administration built the shamelessly named "Coalition of the Willing" in a twin attempt to legitimize and to garner support for an assault on Iraq.

The George W. Bush presidency may have been, at that point, a transparently inept trainwreck of unprecedented proportions, but they at least tried to build a coalition for their war. Bush got on television and addressed the nation in an attempt to sell the idea of his war to the American people. He sought and received approval for the use of military force from the U.S. Congress. It was built on a foundation of lies, but to be honest they were obvious lies, and we should have known better. Dominique de Villepin certainly knew better. As George W. Bush himself so eloquently said, "Fool me- you can't get fooled again."

Personally, I think lying to get the country in a war should be illegal and grounds for impeachment, but annoyingly the actions taken by the administration were identical to what they would be if they were true believers in their cooked up intelligence.

These actions are notable by their absence today. Trump went in front of both the U.S. Congress and the American people two days before his bombing campaign to deliver a State of the Union address described by Jacobin as "an exercise in endurance." This is the biggest speech the President gives all year. Let us examine the sum total of his comments on Iran in that speech:

My first 10 months, I ended eight wars, including Cambodia.

Isn't it funny? You sick people.

Cambodia and Thailand. Pakistan and India would have been a nuclear war. 35 million people said the Prime Minister of Pakistan would have died if it were not for my involvement. Kosovo and Serbia, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia. Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Congo and Rwanda.

And:

As president, I will make peace wherever I can, but I will never hesitate to confront threats to America wherever we must. That's why in a breakthrough operation last June, the United States military obliterated Iran's nuclear weapons program with an attack on Iranian soil known as Operation Midnight Hammer.

And that's it. Taking credit for stopping a war in Iran, and then taking credit for starting that war. Taking credit for obliterating their nuclear weapons program, and then two days later bombing them again because of their nuclear weapons program.

No sales pitch. No congressional approval. In 2026, the "Coalition of the Willing" now refers to a group of countries led by France and the UK as a counter to US indifference in defending Ukraine from their ongoing unilateral invasion by Russia.

After the UK initially refused to allow the use of their air bases for Trump's war in Iran, they walked it back slightly. Spain has outright refused.

And it's no wonder, since Trump has spent the first year of his second term utterly destroying our credibility and our relationships with our former allies, undergoing a humiliation campaign with an unending sequence of threats, insults, and retaliatory tariffs.

Absent the legitimizing force of consensus, absent even a token attempt at building that consensus, the justification of Iran's support for regional chaos starts to ring hollow. Has any action unleashed more regional chaos than the assassination of Khamenei? Is the Iranian regime, as dubious as its legitimacy is in the eyes of a Westerner, not justified in defending itself against such an attack?

Trump has left the US with Israel as its only ally. Israel, a country that has over the last several years committed one of the great genocides of the 21st century. A country led by a leader in search of a new war to deflect against his intelligence and security failures and his domestic corruption charges, a leader who has remarked that US support in attacking Iran "allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years." A leader much like himself.

Netanyahu euphemistically calls the US and Israel a coalition, but what they actually are is pariahs.

Stafford Beer famously coined the phrase "The purpose of a system is what it does", which is popular both among engineers and on the left of the political spectrum. The contention is that, once a system's effects can be understood and measured, maintaining the system is an intent to achieve those effects and those become that system's purpose.

I have a hard time employing this phrase in complex political situations where I feel people have plausible deniability in understanding the likely outcome of their actions. Despite his lack of mental agility, it's likely George W. Bush truly did believe that we could somehow bring democracy to Iraq by force, and that it could become a new ally in the region. He believed in "nation building."

Now, it's puzzling why he would believe in that, having joined the Texas Air National Guard to avoid active duty in Vietnam, a war famous for having failed to accomplish these objectives. But as something of an idiot and an optimist myself, I can just about buy it. His propaganda was clumsy and stupid, but why waste significant time and effort in selling these ideals? It's much more parsimoniously explained as earnest belief rather than as a nefarious ploy.

I extend no such grace to the current administration or its sycophants. It strains credulity to expect to repeat similar actions in a similar region in a similar era and somehow achieve different results. If The Offspring can accurately call out this bullshit 40 years ago, Hanlon's razor is dead. There are no conditions which could provide the cover of doubt as to how this operation will fail.

Of course, how can it fail? How can we define failure when we don't have a definition of success? Its goals are hidden, unknown. If we take Beer's advice, then the only goals left are to sow death and chaos within the borders of an adversary.

And if we're honest, this is how they talk about it. This is how Secretary of Defence War Hegseth describes the operation:

“Iran will be able to do nothing about it,” he warned. “Death and destruction from the sky. All day long.” US pilots “have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly,” he added. Rules of engagement “are designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.”

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight,” Hegseth continued. “We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

These are the words of a tyrant, of a bully. They are a more extreme description of the kind of military coercive diplomacy employed by Vladimir Putin; in fact, they sound a lot more like the bloodthirsty ravings of propagandist Margarita Simonyan. I suppose that's what you get when you put a propagandist in charge of the military.

Trump has said that the "plan" for the war could go on about a month, but he's not given any indication what that plan is or how we will know when its goals will be achieved. The same is true for his recent decapitation strike on Venezuela, which is ostensibly to stop "drug boats", something it hasn't done.

Perhaps we'll never even know what the goals were in Venezuela, as it's barely a memory now that his impulsive bombing in Iran has led to retaliatory attacks aimed at perceived US infrastructure and US allies across the gulf region. Like the rest of his crimes, it remains unexamined as he moves on to manufacture a new outrage.

Some day this will be history. If we're lucky and the arc of the future doesn't lead to ruin, then someday everyone will have always been against this. I've seen this happen to the 2003 Iraq War (unbelievably, I have to specify) in my lifetime.

This is cold comfort if it does nothing to stop the same group of people from committing the same atrocities again. But, as I did back then, I want to leave a record that we truly were against it.

Mar 5