Two weeks in, it’s increasingly clear that the US-led war has taken every problem it aimed to solve – and made it worse
It’s not easy, but let’s try to look at this war in the best, most charitable light. Let’s try to see the US-Israel conflict with Iran as its prosecutors and advocates would want us to see it.
They would say that it has two aims, both legitimate. The first is to weaken if not remove a regime that has done terrible evil to its own people. Who could mourn the supreme leader of a government that, according to one report, gunned down 30,000 of its citizens on the streets in just two days on 8 and 9 January? Listen to those Iranians who long ago reached the glum conclusion that the only way they could be rid of their tormentors was through external military action. As one exiled Iranian put it to me this week: “The Iranian people have been begging the world for help for so many years. They tried voting for change in 2009; they were killed. They tried protesting in 2019, 2022 and this year; they were massacred in the tens of thousands … They were out of all other options.”
The war’s advocates would say its second goal is no less legitimate: to reduce the regime’s ability to threaten its neighbours. Again, who could blame Israel for wanting to defang an enemy that has sought not merely its defeat but, explicitly, its elimination? Iran hoped to make good on that threat by arming and funding the proxies – Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis – that formed its much-vaunted “ring of fire” around Israel. After 7 October 2023, Israel resolved not to wait for its enemies to strike, but to rob them in advance of the means to do so. That, say Israel’s defenders, is why it is bent on destroying Iran’s ballistic and nuclear capacity and hitting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
