War by any other name

To understand the outbreak of high explosives in the Middle East, the war-not-a-war, started-by-but-not-started-by the United States, which this country has already won, but may go on forever, perhaps your best chance of achieving clarity is to sit back and let Desi Lydic of The Daily Show Foxsplain.

“Sometimes you have to start a war to prevent a war that was already a war that’s technically not even a war,” Lydic said, in the middle of a bunch of videos quoting Donald Trump and others about what’s happening. “We may have casualties. That often happens in war,” Trump said in one clip. “I don’t know if this is technically a war,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, once a Trump critic, now a Trump toady. Another Republican, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida said: “Strategic strikes are not war.”

Secretary of Defense—oops, Secretary of War, as he calls himself—Pete Hegseth put it this way: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.” Hegseth, of course, is bringing his maximum lethality, minimum political correctness, tough-guy cowboy style to whatever this conflict is. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars,” Hegseth bragged.

Whatever the Trumpkins call it, this sure sounds like a war to me. We are hearing the same lame comments that we have heard in wars past. “Freedom isn’t free,” for example. Well, whatever this thing is—war, targeted strikes, major combat operations—it really isn’t helping the freedom of Americans. Like other recent American wars—Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq—this one is doing far more to reduce the freedom of the peoples who live in the combat zone than to preserve the freedom of Americans.

“Trump’s war on Iran makes no sense,” Joe Cirincione wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Iran does not pose an imminent threat to the United States, our troops, or allies. Iran’s nuclear program is dormant; it is not racing to a bomb. Iranian missiles cannot hit most of Europe and even less North America.”

Another sound of war is the notion that voting against the war is voting against “the troops.” Last week, the Senate defeated a resolution that would have put a stop to the war-not-a-war. One of those who voted against it was Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican. In a statement explaining her vote, Collins said: “Passing this resolution now would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops. At this juncture, providing unequivocal support to our service members is critically important, as is ongoing consultation by the Administration with Congress.”

That same support-the-troops argument showed up in an interview by CNN anchor Jake Tapper with Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy. As reported by Jon Queally of the Common Dreams online news site, Tapper said that a vote against an expected $50 billion request by Trump to fund the ongoing $1 billion-a-day cost of the war-not-a-war would constitute “voting against the troops.” Murphy pushed back vigorously against Tapper’s support-the-troops notion:

Oh come on. I mean, the American people don’t want this war. They don’t want this war—they have seen what happens when American troops go into places like Iraq, places like Afghanistan. Ultimately we get a lot of people killed, we waste a lot of dollars. The one thing the American people have been clear about is that they don’t want the United States dragged into another long-term war in the Middle East. If you support the troops, then you should vote against this war so that we get our troops out of harm’s way. Virtually nothing good happened from sending thousands of Americans to die in Iraq in the 2000s and if we don’t learn that lesson then shame on every single one of us.

As in previous wars, the bodies of American troops have begun returning in transport planes to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Trump was there on Saturday, a week after the bombing began, saluting the coffins of six reservists from Iowa, killed in an Iranian drone attack on their makeshift operations center in Kuwait. As he saluted, Trump was wearing a white USA baseball cap that apparently came from his merch store. That inappropriate headgear stirred up some controversy.

Also like previous wars, this war-not-a-war has already produced an event that looks a lot like a war crime. On the first day of the bombing, the most outrageous target of the destruction was a primary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab. An estimated 160 or more civilians, most of them children, died. Human Rights Watch said that the bombing of that school should be investigated as a possible war crime. The international human rights group said the available evidence showed that “the attack was carried out by highly accurate, guided munitions, rather than errant weapons whose guidance or propulsion systems failed or were otherwise disrupted and randomly struck the area.” And the organization found no evidence that the school was being used for military purposes. That sounds like yet another failure of “military intelligence.” In my three years in the army, I learned that “military intelligence” is an oxymoron. Mistaken intelligence has caused so many deaths in so many wars over so many years.

What’s next in this war? Could Iran direct attacks, using sleeper cells, inside the United States? Asked whether that’s a concern, Trump nonchalantly said: “I guess.” Oy! Another guess. In explaining why he launched the war, he had said his “feeling,” based on fact, was that Iran was planning to attack. Now he’s guessing again. He went on to say: “We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.” There he goes, using that w-word again. If we are depending on “military intelligence” to ferret out those attacks before they happen, ooh, do we worry.

As this war-not-a-war continues, the White House has made something of a game of it, posting on its social media images from the actual war, together with images from online war games such as Call of Duty. Even war is performative for Trump, who got to be famous enough to run for president by playing the role of a successful businessman on TV in The Apprentice, despite his multiple bankruptcies in the real world.

Let’s put aside the games about this war-not-a-war and review a few facts:

The United States and the United Kingdom together overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1953, bringing back to full power the Shah of Iran. For a quarter-century, he ruled Iran tyrannically, until the revolution that brought the mullahs to power.

Despite the years of “Death to America” chants that followed the revolution, President Barack Obama was able to reach an agreement with Iran in 2015, limiting its progress toward nuclear weapons. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) prescribed better international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear facilities, a pledge by Iran not to develop weapons-grade nuclear material, and relief from the sanctions that were damaging the Iranian economy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the JCPOA would legitimize Iran’s nuclear program and Iran would violate the agreement or simply wait until its provisions ended in 10 to 15 years.

Trump was equally skeptical about the JCPOA. In May 2018, he did what he had said he’d do during the 2016 campaign: He pulled the United States out of the Iran deal. “This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” he said. Of course. Any deal negotiated by Obama, a favorite target of Trump, stood no chance of winning Trump’s approval.

In June 2025, the United States and Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, and Trump said that attack “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability. More recently, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his Middle East envoy, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, were involved in indirect negotiations with Iran about a new nuclear agreement, mediated by Oman. That diplomacy by close confidants of Trump was not enough to avoid the war-not-a-war.

Now that it’s here, the war-not-a-war has become not only the subject of war game memes from the White House, but also of apocalyptic messaging from military commanders to the troops. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported that it has received more than 200 calls since the start of the war-not-a-war from members of all the armed forces about statements on the conflict by Christian zealot commanders. Here’s one communication that MRFF posted on its website, from an active-duty military person, speaking for 15 other members of the unit:

This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be “afraid” as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

Pushing back against the apocalyptic messaging by some commanders, 30 Democratic members of Congress have written to the Department of Defense inspector general, urging: “We must ensure that military operations are guided by facts and the law, not end-times prophecy and extreme religious beliefs.”

Amen to that. It’s bad enough that this war-not-a-war is killing children, blackening the skies above Tehran with clouds from destroyed oil storage facilities, and leaving open the possibility of Iranian attacks within the United States. Let’s not commit blasphemy by blaming it on God.

Let me close with a wise Facebook comment from Shoshana Hershkowitz, music educator, political activist, and founder of Suffolk Progressives:

Most of us have never spoken to an Iranian, and yet we collectively seem to think that we know what is best for their people. We thought the same about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam too.

There are shitty leaders in the world who oppress the vulnerable and harm their people. Maybe we should vote out the ones in this country before we go bomb other countries and tell them to have a revolution. Because unlike Iran, we have the mechanisms in place to do so, and we put Trump in office. TWICE. And Israelis had the opportunity to vote out Netanyahu over the course of multiple elections over 17 years, and keep putting his coalition back in office. So yeah. Maybe we’re not the folks to tell others how to run their countries.