Tag: iran

One of the more fascinating sidelights of our war of choice in Iran is how it has reinforced the devastating consequences of our hollowed-out industrial base, consolidated commercial sector, and overreliance on long intermediated supply chains.

For example, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz carries implications for not only oil but also fertilizer, right at the height of the spring planting season. About one-third of the world’s fertilizer ships through the strait, and without access, prices have jumped and farmers are anxious. Yet there are enough natural resources in the United States—nitrogen, phosphate, potash—to serve all our fertilizer needs; in fact, in the 1930s and ’40s one of the largest fertilizer producers in the world was the Tennessee Valley Authority. This production was wound down in the 1970s; today the industry is dominated by two to four firms, and that may end up having existential implications for hungry people the world over.

A more comically shortsighted example concerns our depleted stock of munitions, one of the few industrial capacities America has retained but which still is imperiled by concentration and outsourcing. These are of course the basic materials necessary to prosecute a war, and you’d think it would be the one item countries would retain the ability to produce themselves. But our trillion-dollar military operates more like a welfare program to help underprivileged Northern Virginia contractors buy second homes and luxury yachts, not as a force that has what it needs when it needs it. Pacifists should rejoice; stupidity in military supply chains puts a binding limit on how many brown-skinned people we can kill.

In the 1990s, dozens of military contractors were reduced to five prime integrators, something demanded by Clinton Defense Secretary Les Aspin and his deputy (and future defense secretary) William Perry at a meeting known as the “Last Supper.” Nearly all weapons and delivery systems now flow through Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. Executives at these companies were called into the White House last Friday—less than a week after the war began—to discuss how to accelerate offensive and especially defensive weapons production amid a shortage that already was weighing on the military. This was after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the war was saved by shifting to smaller bombs rather than “exquisite” munitions for the campaign. If that was the case, why have the meeting?

Specifically, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile systems are so complex that only 96 get built per year; about one-quarter of the U.S. stockpile was used last year in Israel’s brief war with Iran, with many more flying every day as this war continues. Patriot interceptor systems are cheaper and easier to build, but inventories were a quarter full before the war started. Offensive Tomahawk missiles can be produced with greater frequency as well, but as of October last year the stockpile of that weapon was far short of its target. Something like $5.6 billion in weaponry was burned off in just the first two days of the Iran campaign. Trump’s lying aside, analysts who know something are clear on this point: The nation has a few weeks of bombing left before running out of the precision munitions typically used in modern warfare.

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During a press briefing on Friday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed reports that Iran’s new Supreme Leader, 56-year-old Mojtaba Khamenei, has been injured, possibly critically.  

As Hegseth was touting the US Military’s success in incapacitating Iran’s military infrastructure on Friday, he revealed that Khamenei, “the new so-called not-so-Supreme Leader,” is “wounded and likely disfigured.”

“His father dead, he’s scared, he’s injured, he’s on the run, and he lacks legitimacy. It’s a mess for them. Who’s in charge? Iran may not even know,” Hegseth continued.

Hegseth: Their production lines, their military plants, their defense innovation centers, defeated. Iran’s leadership is in no better shape. Desperate and hiding, they’ve gone underground, cowering. That’s what rats do.

We know the new so-called not-so-Supreme Leader is wounded and likely disfigured. He put out a statement yesterday, a weak one, actually, but there was no voice, and there was no video. It was a written statement. He called for unity. Apparently killing tens of thousands of protesters is his kind of unity. Iran has plenty of cameras and plenty of voice recorders. Why a written statement? I think you know why.

His father dead, he’s scared, he’s injured, he’s on the run, and he lacks legitimacy. It’s a mess for them. Who’s in charge? Iran may not even know. With every passing hour, we know and we know they know that the military capabilities of their evil regime are crumbling. They can barely communicate, let alone coordinate. They’re confused, and we know it. Our response, we will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.

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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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