Tag: iran

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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I’ve been reading many people on many sites claiming that we have been at war with Iran for 47 years. I found that odd because I thought I distinctly remembered good relations between the Iran and U.S. governments after 9/11. So I asked ChatGPT, “What did the Iranian government do in 2001 to help the U.S. government after the 9/11 attacks?”

I got a long answer that fit what I had vaguely remembered. Here it is:

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Iranian government actually provided several forms of practical assistance to the United States and the emerging Afghan government in the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This cooperation was limited and short-lived, but it was real and fairly significant in late 2001.

1. Intelligence sharing and operational cooperation

Iran quietly cooperated with the United States during the early phase of the war in Afghanistan.

• Iranian officials met with U.S. diplomats in Geneva in late 2001 to coordinate efforts against the Taliban.
• Iran helped identify Taliban targets and provided intelligence that assisted U.S. bombing campaigns.
• Iranian Revolutionary Guard elements working with anti-Taliban forces helped organize operations against Taliban positions.

Iran had strong reasons for this: the Taliban were a bitter enemy of Iran, especially after Taliban forces killed Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan in 1998.

2. Support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance

Before and after 9/11, Iran backed the Northern Alliance, the main Afghan force fighting the Taliban.

• Iran supplied the alliance with money, weapons, and training.
• When the U.S. began military operations in October 2001, the Northern Alliance served as the main ground force against the Taliban.
• Iranian networks helped facilitate cooperation between Northern Alliance commanders and U.S. forces.

This assistance indirectly strengthened the U.S.-led campaign because Northern Alliance offensives, combined with U.S. airpower, rapidly toppled the Taliban government.

3. Direct assistance in the fall of Herat

Iranian special-operations forces (the Quds Force) reportedly worked with anti-Taliban fighters in western Afghanistan.

• They helped organize an uprising in the city of Herat in November 2001, which helped drive out Taliban forces before U.S. troops arrived.

4. Diplomatic help creating the new Afghan government

Iran also played a constructive role in the Bonn Conference (December 2001), which created the interim Afghan government after the Taliban collapsed.

• Iranian diplomats pressured Afghan factions they influenced to accept compromises.
• They helped secure support for Hamid Karzai as the head of the new Afghan interim government.

Several U.S. officials later said Iran’s role was instrumental in reaching the final agreement.

5. Safety assurances and humanitarian cooperation

Through back channels (mainly via Switzerland):

• Iran signaled it would help U.S. personnel who accidentally crossed into Iranian territory during operations near the Afghan border.
• It also cooperated on refugee and humanitarian issues involving Afghanistan.

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War with Iran is being sold as “strategy,” but it looks a lot like habit. A familiar pattern repeats: vague objectives, elastic legal theories, and a confident promise that the costs will be contained. Then the bill arrives anyway, in blood, money, and credibility.

In this round, the costs are already visible in the most predictable place: energy. Fighting that threatens traffic through the Strait of Hormuz does not just “hurt the other side.” It shakes a chokepoint that, in 2024, carried about 20 million barrels per day of oil, roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption. Markets do not care about speeches. They price risk, and they pass it along to households and firms.

Calling this “a small price” is not analysis. It is marketing. Economies, including America’s, still operate inside a global price system for energy and shipping, and officials themselves acknowledge the conflict has pushed energy markets and prices higher.

The China excuse is bad strategy and worse economics

One of the more fashionable rationales for attacking Iran is the “China angle”: Iran trades with China, so breaking Iran breaks China. This is the kind of logic that sounds plausible until you compare it to reality.

Start with the basic arithmetic. U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled about $658.9 billion in 2024, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. That is not a footnote. It is a structural feature of the world economy. When two economies are connected at that scale, “hurting” one is not a neat chess move. It is self-inflicted collateral damage.

The International Monetary Fund has spent years warning about what happens when states turn economic integration into a weapon. In its words, greater trade restrictions “could reduce global economic output by as much as 7 percent” over the long run. That is not a slogan. It is a forecast about costs that do not vanish because a strategist wants them to.

Now add the Iran-specific detail that is supposed to make the “China angle” sound clever. China does buy large volumes of Iranian crude; much of it routed through sanctions-evasion channels. The Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy estimates that China imported about 1.38 million barrels per day of crude from Iran in 2025, around 12% of China’s total crude imports, and that China purchases about 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

But if your plan is to use war to interrupt an adversary’s energy supply, you have chosen the most globally contagious lever imaginable. The same chokepoint logic that supposedly pinches Beijing also squeezes everyone else. When shipping slows, insurance premiums jump, freight rates rise, and oil prices move. That is not a “China problem.” It is a world problem.

There is another flaw, even more basic. Treating China as the villain for “hedging” against U.S. power is rich coming from a government that has used economic sanctions and financial restrictions as routine tools of statecraft for decades. Great powers teach others how to behave. If the lesson is that supply chains are weapons, do not be surprised when other countries build armor, stockpiles, and alternative routes.

The nuclear lesson: if you want fewer bombs, stop rewarding them

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