Just as negotiations between the USA and Iran seemed to be making some real substantive progress - wide-ranging and long-lasting talks on nuclear limits and monitoring, sanctions relief, access to energy sectors, economic cooperation - the rug was pulled, bridges were burned, and a full-scale regional war suddenly seems not just possible but likely.
In the midst of these intense and apparently quite promising mediated discussions on Iran's nuclear program, the USA and Israel have jointly launched a massive and apparently ongoing operation to overthrow Iran's government. End of negotiations. Who knows what Trump's rationale was (rationale? Trump?), but his negotiating team seems to have been completely blindsided. It has all the hallmarks of a whim (believe it or not!), probably a whim deftly engineered by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been itching for years to attack his bête noir Iran.
Where this will go is anyone's guess, but Iran is far from defenceless, and has already responded in kind by attacking US bases in other Middle Eastern countries (Iraq, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar, for starters). Multiple states could be drawn into this conflict, and concerted attacks on Israel can only be hours away. For someone who purports to want to avoid "forever wars" and to be working for world peace, Trump sure has a strange approach to it.
So, what is this, then? Another Venezuela? Another Iraq? Libya, maybe? Just another step on Trump's question for world domination? Iran's case is different from any of those previous regime change operations. Iran is structurally different, "an ideologically entrenched state with layered institutions, doctrinal legitimacy, and a deeply embedded security apparatus", not just a maverick state presided over by a dynastic dictatorship. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei was apparently "taken out" on Day 1, but there is a whole theocratic apparatus around him which will click seamlessly into place. And now they have a convenient martyr to rally around.
Trump portrays the attacks as doing the people of Iran a favour, calling on them to "seize control of your destiny" and to rise up against the oppressive Islamic theocracy that has ruled the country since the 1979 Islamic revolution. But how exactly are they supposed to do that? There is no plan in place. All Trump has done is to destabilize the country without any thought for its future, leaving it ripe for chaos and penury to ensure.
Trump's exhortation for the Iranian people to "take over your government" is naive at best. Even if the Iranian people (not just the ex-patriate Iranians dancing and singing in the capital cities of western nations but the actual reaidents of Iran) want regime change - and available polls suggest that they overwhelmingly do - they are not in a position to make that happen. And, make no mistake, the Islamic regime and its powerful well-prepared regressive machinery is still very much in power, even if many of their leaders have been assassinated by Trump's strikes. Plus, global history is against it: aerial bombing campaigns have a terrible historial record of fomenting regime change.
Reactions by most western leaders to the US intervention have been predictably muted, given that everyone is scared stiff of crossing Trump. Most chose to condemn Iran's "indiscriminate" strikes on US military bases, while conveniently not even mentioning America's indiscriminate attack on Iran. Implacable Iran adversary Saudi Arabia and the 22-nation Arab League also chose to condemn the "blatant violation of the sovereignty" of those Arabic countries that Iran attacked, blithely papering over the US attacks that precipitated them. Benjamin Netanyahu said ... well, you know the kind of thing Netanyahu said.
Australia and - perhaps surprisingly - Canada were, if anything, less guarded in their language and their support of the US attacks. Albanese strongly supported the US's efforts to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons (wait, wasn't that what the Oman-mediated talks in Geneva were about?) Canadian Prime Minister Carney issued a remarkably pro-US statement in favour of the American military action, calling Iran "the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East". Well, that may have been the case once, but now that role has been assumed by Israel and the USA.
In a knee-jerk reaction, US antagonists China and Russia predictably did condemn the US attack, but then what else were they supposed to do? Brave little Oman, which had been mediating the US-Iran nuclear talks, also called out the USA, calling the attacks a "violation of the rules of international law and the principle of settling disputes through peaceful means rather than though hostility and the shedding of blood". The UN has been surprisingly silent thus far.
The US Congress is, as always, hopelessly divided. It was just days away from a formal debate on potential military action in Iran, a debate that the surprise attack has handily pre-empted. Democrats and at least a handful of Republicans are warning that Trump's actions are (yet again) illegal and unconstitutional. They were launched without Congressional approval or debate, and in response to no credible imminent threat. Even if a censoring motion passes, though, Trump knows that he can override it, and a two-thirds majority to override THAT would be a stretch indeed. It would therefore amount to little more than a stern rebuke, a proverbial slap on the wrist.
So, how should we see this apparently gratuitous military escalation, this unprompted attack on an independent sovereign state, ethically speaking?
The US and its supporters (which apparently includes Canada) argue that the action was a necessary evil, needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons which would pose an existential threat to the region and to global stability in general. Furthermore, it was needed to stop Iran's human rights abuses and its violent suppression of domestic protests, arguing that removing the current regime would benefit both the Iranian people and regional security.
And yes, you can see some elements of sense there, even if Iran is actually nowhere near developing nuclear weapons, and promising talks were under way anyway to address that very threat. No-one really likes Iran and its methods (apart from its own hard-line Islamist radicals), but that is not the only issue here. Few people really like the political systems in Russia, or Hungary, or North Korea, or Afghanistan, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but you don't see the USA invading them to force regime change. It is very selective in its choice of invasion, even if not necessarily logical.
The other side of the coin, though, is that invading Iran without UN and Security Council approval is quite clearly a contravention of international law, and serves to further erode confidence in the international rule of law. There is little to distinguish it from the US's earlier invasion of Venezuela, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, etc, etc. Pre-emptive or "preventive" wars are rarely moral, usually prompted by other self-serving or mercenary factors, making it a "war of choice" - never a good idea.
When you think about it, it's pretty patronizing to say that Iran cannot ever have nuclear weapons, but the US (and France, and Pakistan, and Israel, and others) can. And that the US knows better what is good for Iran than its own government. Just because we don't like the way a country runs its affairs is not a sufficient reason to wade in there and change it. There is a little thing called sovereignty. Remember the outcry when Trump talked about the US annexing Greenland, and making Canada the 51st state?
There are potential humanitarian concerns too. Although Iran itself was in breach of humanitarian norms in its brutal put-down of domestic dissent, initiating a war in which civilians are certain to suffer and regional instability is increased is not a valid response. There are already reports that a school has been struck in Iran, with unconfirmed reports of 153 children killed - it always seems to happen that hospitals and schools end up suffering, despite claims of "precision targeting" - and this thing is just getting started. The invasion could even serve to strengthen the Islamic regime's resolve, and weaken internal grassroots resistance. Either way, it is unlikely to benefit the Iranian people, and the establishment of a puppet regime serving US and Israeli interests - which is probably the endgame here - will not help them.
As you can probably tell, my instincts fall in the latter camp. The United States' invasion of Iran is not a just war, even if such a thing exists.
