Modern wars have always had their way of spawning quickly adopted cliches. Most of these are terrible, because they deaden our senses to the reality of war, reducing its horror and complexity to flat and anodyne thoughtlets.
One could make a very long list of them, but for brevity I’ll just offer a few: fog of war, boots on the ground, surgical strike, collateral damage, and hearts and minds.
Modern wars have always had their way of spawning quickly adopted cliches. Most of these are terrible, because they deaden our senses to the reality of war, reducing its horror and complexity to flat and anodyne thoughtlets.
One could make a very long list of them, but for brevity I’ll just offer a few: fog of war, boots on the ground, surgical strike, collateral damage, and hearts and minds.
There are two of these awful, formulaic ways of speaking about—or perhaps distancing ourselves from—the reality of warfare that are performing an extraordinary amount of work in discussions of the latest U.S. attacks on Iran.
Here I have in mind the casual and much-invoked phrase “bad guys,” which is favored by the bellicose U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; and the slightly more complicated claim that critics of the war “won’t shed any tears” for Iran’s rulers—a way of signaling that opposition to the conflict does not amount to sympathy for the militant clerics who have long governed the country.
These two expressions, favored by politicians on opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum, share a grave flaw: Their radical reductiveness preempts the serious thought that should accompany—and ideally precede—any resort to war.
The phrase “bad guys,” or its close cousin, “bad actor,” is by far the easier target. The world is not drawn in black and white, and thinking of it in that way is a recipe for action without reflection. This, in turn, is often a recipe for tragedy. As for “won’t shed any tears,” this allows politicians who employ the phrase to sidestep any of the messy moral complexity inherent to U.S. relations with Iran.
To the extent that history is taken into account at all in the U.S. narrative about Iran, it tends to begin with the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. This is the most convenient starting point for any propagandist seeking to drum up popular support for war among a U.S. population that opinion polls show to be weary of global conflict.
Most Americans know little about Iran, yet memories of the hostage crisis linger and make it easy to portray the country as solely responsible for the enmity between it and the West. “Bad guys,” or even worse language that U.S. President Donald Trump and his cabinet members have used, such as referring to the country’s leaders as lunatics, is, in fact, the functional equivalent of the Iranian mullahs calling the United States the “Great Satan,” which they have done for years.
In the decades since 1979, Iran’s leadership has undoubtedly committed many atrocious acts, ranging from support for international terrorism to violence and harsh repression against its own people. But acknowledging those crimes does not justify ignoring the ways U.S. policy—both before and after 1979—has fueled Iranian radicalism and perpetuated the unremitting hostility that Tehran’s leaders have shown toward Washington for decades.
A quick review of facts commonly left out of Western coverage of the country, and therefore generally unknown to the public, makes this clear. A pivotal 20th-century event in the Middle East was the 1953 coup organized by the United States and Britain against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, undertaken largely to preserve Western control over Iran’s vast petroleum resources. The coup derailed the beginnings of a democratic system of government in Iran: Instead of democracy, Western support for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi helped solidify monarchical rule, which turned ever more authoritarian, and fueled the anti-Americanism that led to and helped sustain Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Many other episodes have fed Iranian hostility and paranoia about the West. Notably, in the early 1980s, the United States cynically supported Iraq following its invasion of Iran, which produced one of the bloodiest and most costly wars of the late 20th century. Washington removed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government from its well-deserved inclusion in its list of state sponsors of terrorism, supplied intelligence and dual-use technology to the Iraqi aggressors, and even overlooked Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran. As most people know, the United States later turned on Hussein, eventually invading Iraq and toppling him, after his regime’s attempted seizure of Kuwaiti oil fields. Iraq then descended into a period of civil war and chaos from which it has never fully recovered.
This amounted, in effect, to the belated realization of a U.S. objective regarding both Iran and Iraq, once wistfully expressed by Henry Kissinger: “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
Revisiting this history is not merely an exercise in memory. It helps explain why the religious figures who have run Iran for decades have been so obsessed with their own security, and relatedly, so skeptical about Western intentions.
In writing this column, my highest concern, though, has to do with the future of the United States. Trump’s seemingly improvised assault on Iran is perilous to the United States in two fundamental ways. The first has to do with U.S. democracy. The list of so-called bad guys in the world is long, and after seven offensive U.S. military actions around the world barely a year into Trump’s second term, it is becoming ever more possible to envision the accelerating destruction of Washington’s democracy in the pursuit of demons abroad. The assassination of Iran’s leaders, the failure to seek congressional approval for this war, the shifting and often incoherent rationales for this campaign, and crass rhetoric and bravado from Trump, Hegseth, and many of their Republican supporters all bode poorly for the United States’ own democratic legitimacy.
Although this was a clear war of choice that lacked, by any reasonable definition, an imminent threat from Iran, the Trump administration has appeared incapable of providing a sensible explanation for its actions, never mind a convincing justification. Trump and his officials have variously referred to the conflict as a way to transform Iranian politics, “not a so-called regime change war,” and preemptive action for “imminent threats.” What will they say if today’s triumphalism gives way to renewed cycles of conflict, as with U.S. interventions in the Middle East in the past?
The second source of my concern about the United States’ future is what increasingly seems to be the outsourcing of the country’s foreign policy and security calculations to the reckless aims and obsessions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is one thing to proclaim support for Israel’s right to security, an idea I readily subscribe to myself. It is another thing altogether for the United States to behave as if whatever Israel desires makes sense for the Middle East, or for the United States.
Netanyahu, who has a decades-long record of advocating for war against Iran, has finally gotten his wish. But this is not the only one of Netanyahu’s ambitions that Trump has tolerated or encouraged. And some of those aims—such as turning the West Bank and Gaza into zones of permanent violence, with draconian Israeli control of their Palestinian populations—look less like solutions than invitations to endless conflict.
Besides the inherent injustices involved, what Israel’s actions resemble most to me are recipes for future insoluble enmities like those the United States helped catalyze with its coup in Iran many decades ago, along with countless new tragedies.
