There’s Absolutely No Justification for Trump’s War on Iran

United States president Donald Trump is not primarily waging war on Iran. In waging war on Iran, Trump is waging war on human reason.

I do not say that war with Iran is inherently unreasonable. Nor do I mean that Trump has offered poor justifications, or justifications that most people would recognize as inadequate, in defence of his war in Iran. I mean that he has mounted no defence at all.

Reasonable people could imagine potential justifications for war with Iran. Indeed, reasonable people can do little but imagine them: in place of justifications, which require logic and evidence, Trump’s administration has offered only scattered impulses, a random misfiring of synapses spoken aloud that occasionally happen to include the word “because.”

First: “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Washington Post. Certainly, he had his pick of evidence that would show Iranians aren’t free, but he declined to call upon any of it. He presented no photographs of body bags containing Iranian protesters; he cited no testimony of survivors who watched their unarmed loved ones gunned down in the streets, some of them while fleeing burning buildings.

More strikingly, neither did Trump unveil a plan to free the Iranian people from the regime that has tormented them—a plan that any reasonable person would have surely formed before taking an action as otherwise existentially reckless as bombing the most dangerous regime in one of the most volatile regions on Earth.

Of course, Trump had no such plan—any more than he had a clear objective. Within days, Trump and his acolytes claimed that they had never wished to change the regime (they had publicly stated that they wished to change the regime) but also that they had already changed the regime (they had not changed the regime).

Another impulse: He said he had to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, within weeks—a nuclear weapon from a program he claimed to have destroyed this past summer. Again, Trump made no attempt to provide evidence or even to forge it. Colin Powell, then secretary of state, at least had the decency to show up at the United Nations—that day in 2003—sit in front of a room full of skeptical peers, and wave around a little plastic tube full of what may as well have been baking soda, for all the danger that Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction presented. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell declared, falsely. “What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence,” he said of fictions created by active imaginations. Two years later, Powell expressed mortification for what he called a “blot” on his record. But his poor pantomime of the facts implied their pre-eminence. Trump, by ignoring them, negates them.

Yet another: An attack on United States soil was imminent, Trump said. Iran “would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.” He claimed this not only without any semblance of evidence but in direct, flagrant, almost gleeful contradiction of evidence provided by his own administration’s intelligence and defence agencies. Military intelligence had concluded that Iran is ten years off from being able to strike America; the Pentagon, that Iran wouldn’t strike unless it was struck first. But according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump “had a good feeling Iran was going to strike.” Trump offered no logic, however twisted; no evidence, however drummed up; no argument in any recognizable form. Just words, from his head.

And still more words: The hypothetically imminent attack on America was to have been a response to a hypothetically imminent attack on Iran by America’s ally, Israel. Said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, ludicrously: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action”—a claim, once again, unsupported by even an attempt at evidence—and, “we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces”—a conclusion that makes no attempt to follow from the claim.

One final bit of Trump’s mental ephemera: “I got him before he could get me,” he said of the foreign leader he had killed who may have plotted to kill him. He’d waged war to commit a preventative revenge killing, boasted the leader of the free world.

On the afternoon of the third day of the war, when Trump finally devoted a few complete sentences to formally articulating his war aims, he argued more cogently, and with greater conviction, in favour of his ballroom than he did in favour of bombing Iran. The ballroom will be beautiful, it won’t take too long, it won’t always be a black hole in the ground, he pleaded.

To say that this is typical of a fascist war is to be unfair to fascist wars. Benito Mussolini at least paid lip service to the League of Nations before invading Ethiopia; Adolf Hitler met with the leaders of France, Britain, and Italy at Munich before annexing the Sudetenland. Each offered reasons for his actions: dishonest reasons, imperialist reasons, evil reasons, but reasons nonetheless. How many allies did Trump argue with before bombing Tehran? He didn’t even argue with the United States Congress; he simply didn’t ask it for permission. The Polish-American writer Czesław Miłosz called Nazism “an intellectual zero.” One wonders what measure he would have taken of Trumpism.

• This Is What American Fascism Looks Like
• I Was a Prisoner in Iran. I’ve Seen the US Meddle in the Region for Decades
• Why Regime Change by Force Is Unlikely to Work in Iran

If not to the fascist war justifications of the twentieth century, then to what might we compare Trump’s pointed refusal to justify waging war against Iran? To Trump’s other recent wars: against Minnesotans, and against boats in international waters. In the case of the Minnesotans, he claims to be fighting illegal immigration, making no attempt to explain why his masked men hunt for migrants in a state as far as possible from the Mexican border; why they detain American citizens with brown skin; why they beat and kill people who film and try to escape them. In the case of the boats, he claims to be fighting drug smuggling, releasing no legal memos that might justify the strikes, releasing no video of the strikes which might contradict reports that the men were defenceless and killed in cold blood. When his immigration officers killed Minnesotans, he called the dead domestic terrorists; when his navy kills people in international waters, he calls the dead narco-terrorists. He calls them these things within hours of their murder; he does not provide evidence for these claims, because he does not have any evidence and cannot know whether his claims are true. His claims are not simply untrue: they are publicly made up out of thin air.

Agree, disagree, or take violent umbrage with other regimes’ stated rationales for war: they had them. Even a bad reason is an admission of the supremacy of reason. To give dishonest reasons or poorly sourced reasons isn’t equal to actually being reasonable, no, but it’s better than nullifying reason. It credits the listener with being worth persuading, however disingenuous the argument. It credits the truth with having value, however false the evidence. To offer no logic at all, to offer no proof at all, is to negate human reason. And to negate human reason is to negate humanity.

It is also to negate the idea of a just war. If Trump’s animating impulse in Iran could be said to have a philosophical predecessor, it would be the sophists’ assertion that justice is the prerogative of the stronger, the natural corollary of which is “war is just if the strong wage it.” Hannah Arendt spoke the mind of reasonable nation states when she called violent warfare the “final arbiter in international affairs.” For Trump, there is no arbitration. There is only the whim of his will. To offer no justification, then, isn’t an oversight. It is the point. Betas explain themselves. Alphas act.

“We could use their base if we want . . . Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it,” Trump said of America’s ally, Spain, who had declined to participate in his war. The only thing stopping Trump is his inclination to be stopped. Or as Trump put it on a previous occasion: “My own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

So no, Trump did not attack Iran because nuclear weapons because freedom because pre-emptive defence, QED. The reason Trump attacked is this: because he could, because he felt like it, because war is violent and chaotic and cruel and a visually spectacular distraction, and he enjoys all of these things. Defence secretary Pete Hegseth has come closer than anyone in the administration to describing the driving instinct of this war: “death and destruction from the sky all day long.”

Trumpism does not ask the world to understand. The world is asked only to submit. Violently subduing the other into submission—the ultimate negation of reason—is the natural end of Trumpism. This war does not end in violence in the Middle East. It ends in violence as amorphous and free floating as the random assortment of nasty, brutish impulses that inspired it.

The war will end, though. A war on reason is so anti-human that it cannot persist in human society.

This is what I said, at any rate, to an old woman I met at a Toronto gathering last year, who had expressed concern about Trump’s particular brand of fascism. She was silent for a moment. “I was a child when I was hidden from the Nazis,” she replied. “It ended, yes. But it felt so very long.”