The United States has no right to wage war on Iran, or to have a say who governs the country. The opinion pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, however, are offering facile humanitarian arguments for the US to escalate its attacks on Iran. These are based on the nonsensical assumption that the US wants to help brighten Iranians’ futures.
In two editorials addressing the possibility of the US undertaking a bombing and shooting war on Iran, the Washington Post expressed no opposition to such policies and endorsed economic warfare as well.
Crediting Trump with “the wisdom of distinguishing between an authoritarian regime and the people who suffer under its rule,” the first Post editorial (1/2/26) approvingly quoted Trump’s Truth Social promise (1/2/26) to Iranian protesters that the US “will come to their rescue…. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
For the Post, the problem was not that Trump was threatening to bomb a sovereign state, but that “airstrikes are, at best, a temporary solution”:
If the administration wants this time to be different, it will need to oversee a patient, sustained campaign of maximum pressure against the government…. The optimal strategy is to economically squeeze the regime as hard as possible at this moment of maximum vulnerability. More stringent enforcement of existing oil sanctions would go a long way…. Western financial controls are actually working quite well.
Thus, the paper offers advice on how to integrate bombing Iran into a broader effort to overthrow the country’s government in a hybrid war. Central to that project are the sanctions with which the Post is so thoroughly impressed. Such measures have “squeeze[d] the regime” by, for example, decimating “the government’s primary source of revenue, oil exports, limiting the state’s ability to provide for millions of impoverished Iranians through social safety nets” (CNN, 10/19/25).
That the US continues to apply the sanctions, knowing that they have these effects, demonstrates that it has no interest in, as the Post put it, “free[ing]” Iranians “from bondage.”
Hellbound and Down 