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The irony of the Big Lie about Iran’s alleged “47-Year War On America” is that the imperatives of Empire caused Washington to take actions in the decades after the February 1979 Iranian Revolution that amounted to the opposite – a relentless five decades long Washington instigated war on Iran.

First, as we showed in Part 1, Washington’s foolish refusal to extradite the Shah and meet the reasonable demands of the hostage-holding students facilitated the takeover of the Revolution by theocratic hardliners; and then in rapid fire succession Washington launched successive overt and covert attacks on the Khomeini-dominated government that caused it to permanently harden its stance against the US government.

The primary and defining battering ram of Washington’s post-1979 attack on the new Iranian government was its extensive aid to Saddam Hussein during his eight year war on Iran. Anyone with at least a passing knowledge of the hundreds of thousands of death and sweeping economic devastation that this war brought to the Iranian people might well understand why the ritual chant “death to America” took hold during these early days of the Islamic Republic.

As it happened, Saddam Husein launched his war in September 1980 partly out of fear that the Islamic revolution in Shiite Iran would spillover into Iraq, where 35% of the population was Shiite; and also because he opportunistically recognized that Iran’s regular military had been badly impaired owing to sweeping purges of suspected pro-Shah officers by the new regime.

Moreover, Hussein also recognized another even more important Iranian strategic disability: Namely, that the new regime had inherited a sophisticated military arsenal largely equipped with U.S.-made hardware from the Shah’s era, including F-14 Tomcat fighters, M-60 tanks, Hawk missiles, and various artillery systems, but that this formidable arsenal had been largely sidelined by lack of maintenance and spare parts.

Again, the Washington keepers of the Empire were the culprit. Determined to show that they would not be pushed around by a rag-tag band of 400 students holed-up in the US Embassy, the Carter Administration imposed a wide array of sanctions and trade embargoes on Iran. These actions included suspensions of arms export licenses, cancellation of pending arms sales and an Executive Order in the spring of 1980, which initiated a trade embargo that stopped the flow of most civilians goods as well as US military exports and spare parts to Iran.

Again, there was no reason for Washington’s hostile act of economic warfare against the incipient Islamic Republic except the imperatives of Empire. If anything, the fall of the Shah should have been a wake up call to Washington to get the hell out of the region because nothing of importance regarding America’s Homeland Security was at stake – even as the new found oil-wealth pouring into these nations and statelets had inherently become an engine of political turmoil and economic dislocation.

In any event, Washington’s embargo on weapons spare parts tilted the balance heavily against Iran when Saddam Hussein invaded the latter in September 1980. Lack of access to essential maintenance components had resulted in the grounding of much of Iran’s air force and rendered most of its ground-based armored units inoperable. By 1982, up to 70-80% of Iran’s U.S.-sourced equipment was non-functional due to lack of parts, forcing the military to cannibalize operational vehicles and aircraft for spares and repairs.

The US embargo not only isolated Iran from its primary supplier but also pressured allies and third-party nations to withhold support, thereby exacerbating the degradation of its conventional capabilities.The Reagan administration intensified these Carter restrictions in 1983 with Operation Staunch, a global diplomatic campaign aimed at blocking arms sales and spare parts to Iran, particularly for its legacy US planes, tanks and other weaponry.

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For nearly two millennia, the Christian intellectual tradition has maintained that war, while sometimes permissible, is never presumptively just. The burden of proof always falls on the party making war, not on the party resisting it. Augustine of Hippo laid the groundwork in the fifth century. Thomas Aquinas refined it in the thirteenth. Their framework has endured because it is rigorous, demanding, and difficult to satisfy. It was designed to be difficult to satisfy. War kills people, and the Christian faith holds that every human person bears the image of God.

The war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28, 2026 fails every criterion of the just war tradition. Not most of them. All of them.

Legitimate Authority

Aquinas held that war must be waged by a sovereign authority with the responsibility and competence to make such a decision. In the American constitutional order, that authority rests with Congress. Article I, Section 8 is unambiguous: Congress shall have the power to declare war. Not the president. Not the secretary of defense. Not a foreign head of state calling from Jerusalem.

On March 5, the House of Representatives voted on a War Powers Resolution to halt Trump’s unauthorized war. It failed 212–219, but the very fact that it was brought to a vote – after the bombing had already begun – tells you everything about the constitutional posture of this conflict. The war was started without congressional authorization. Only two Republicans, Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson, voted to reassert the legislature’s war powers. The executive branch launched a regime-change war against a nation of ninety million people on its own initiative, and Congress, rather than checking that power, acquiesced after the fact.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has admitted that the United States launched the war in part because Israel was planning to attack Iran unilaterally, and Washington decided to join rather than restrain. This is not sovereign deliberation. This is a tail wagging a dog into a catastrophe. The criterion of legitimate authority is not met.

Just Cause

The classical just war tradition permits war only to correct a grave, public evil – typically an act of aggression against the party going to war or against innocents it has a duty to protect. What was the grave evil that Iran inflicted on the United States?

President Trump, in his State of the Union address on February 24, accused Iran of reviving efforts to build nuclear weapons and possessing advanced missile capabilities threatening the United States and Europe. But the administration’s own intelligence community had reached the opposite conclusion. A classified National Intelligence Council report, completed roughly one week before the attack, found that even a large-scale assault was unlikely to oust the Iranian government. More critically, the intelligence community has never established that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s own director acknowledged on air that the Agency had no proof of a systematic Iranian effort to build a bomb.

We have seen this before. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be fabricated. As multiple observers have noted, the rhetorical pattern is virtually identical: unproven allegations of WMDs, claims of imminent threat, and a rush to war that preempts the diplomatic process. The Iranian foreign minister was saying a historic deal was within reach when the bombs fell. The Omani foreign minister, mediating the talks, confirmed that Tehran had agreed to significant concessions. The United States bombed anyway.

There is no just cause here. There is a manufactured one.

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