Just for Fun: The War in Iran, Part II
A two-part series examining the US-Israeli war on Iran: The arguments that weren't
The legal case is clear. The United States waged aggressive war against a sovereign nation without congressional authorisation, without UN Security Council approval, without an armed attack to trigger self-defence, without imminence, and without proportionality. It did so while negotiations were underway — negotiations that, by every credible account, were proceeding in good faith and producing results that went beyond anything previously achieved. It did so for the third time — having abandoned the JCPOA in 2018 while Iran was in compliance, having struck Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 during the Twelve-Day War, and now having launched a full-scale war in February 2026 while a second deal — stronger than the JCPOA — was on the table.
This was not merely an act of aggression against Iran. It was a betrayal — of the Iranian people who had come to the table, of the constitutional system that reserves the power of war to Congress, of the international legal order that the United States itself authored, of the American people in whose name these acts were committed, and of every allied nation in the region now absorbing the direct consequences of a war they did not choose: the Gulf states managing missile threats and refugee flows, the economies destabilised by the disruption of energy markets, and the nations beyond the Middle East contending with the ripple effects of a conflict that was launched while diplomacy was winning.
But law alone has never stopped a war that enough people wanted. Millions of Americans were primed for decades to support this one, and they have reasons — or at least they believe they do. The nuclear threat. The theological mandate. The media narrative. The political calculation. Four arguments, each carrying enough surface plausibility to survive a cable news segment, each repeated often enough to feel self-evident.
This article takes each on its own terms.
The Nuclear Threat
The nuclear argument — which Netanyahu has been pushing for decades, since before Iran even had a civilian nuclear programme — suggests that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, diplomacy had failed, and military action was the only remaining option to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. It sounds reasonable. It is also circular, and the circularity is the argument’s fatal defect.
In 2015, the United States and five other world powers negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. The agreement constrained Iran’s nuclear programme with a specificity that no military strike could match. Iran agreed to reduce its operating centrifuges by two-thirds. It accepted limits on uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent — far below the roughly 90 percent needed for a weapon. It capped its stockpile of low-enriched uranium at 300 kilograms. It redesigned the Arak heavy water reactor to close the plutonium pathway to a bomb. And it submitted to the most intrusive verification regime in the history of nuclear diplomacy, granting the International Atomic Energy Agency access to monitor compliance at every stage.⁵⁹
The JCPOA was not perfect. Critics pointed to sunset provisions — limits on centrifuges that would expire after ten years, enrichment caps after fifteen. These were legitimate concerns. But the verification regime had no sunset. And the deal’s core achievement was measurable: under the JCPOA, Iran’s breakout time — the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a single bomb — was extended to over one year. That year was not a guarantee of safety. It was a window — a window for detection, for diplomacy, for response. It was the difference between a programme that could be monitored and one that could not.⁶⁰
On the eighth of May 2018, President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA.⁶¹
He did so while Iran was in compliance. The IAEA had confirmed it in every report since the deal’s implementation. Trump’s own Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, acknowledged that the IAEA had found no evidence of non-compliance. General Joseph Dunford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September 2017 that “Iran is adhering to its JCPOA obligations” and that the agreement “has delayed Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.”⁶² The intelligence community agreed. The inspectors agreed. The military agreed. The President withdrew anyway.
What followed was predictable, because it was predicted. Within fourteen months of the withdrawal, Iran had exceeded its enrichment limits. It began producing uranium at 4.5 percent, then 20 percent, then 60 percent. It installed advanced centrifuges the deal had prohibited. It restricted IAEA inspector access. By the time the IAEA issued its November 2024 report, Iran’s breakout time had collapsed from over one year to approximately one week.⁶³
Let the arithmetic speak. The deal constrained the programme. The withdrawal removed the constraints. The programme expanded. And the expansion of the programme is now cited as the justification for bombing it.
This is not an argument. It is a circle. The administration that created the conditions for Iran’s nuclear advancement now presents that advancement as the reason the war was necessary. It is like a man who burns down the fire station and then points to the ashes as proof that the neighbourhood needs better fire protection.
Laura Rockwood, who spent twenty-eight years at the IAEA and now serves as a senior fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, stated it plainly: Iran’s nuclear advancement occurred “not because of the JCPOA, but because President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA.” Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University who worked as a special envoy for Iran under the Biden administration, confirmed: “Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018 had a significant accelerating effect on the program.”⁶⁴
But the circularity is only half the indictment. The other half is the negotiations.
As documented in Part One, on the twenty-fifth of February 2026, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly that a deal to avert military conflict was “within reach.” On the twenty-seventh of February — one day before the strikes — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News and disclosed that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, irreversible downgrading of existing stockpiles, and full IAEA verification. He called it “a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations.”⁶⁵ This was not the JCPOA being reheated. This was a commitment that went beyond what the JCPOA had secured.
The President had a diplomatic victory on the table — his own diplomatic victory, achieved through his own administration’s negotiations, mediated by an ally he himself had engaged. He chose war. The strikes began on the twenty-eighth of February. The additional talks scheduled for the following Monday in Vienna never took place.
The nuclear argument for this war does not merely fail. It collapses into its own contradiction. The man who abandoned the deal that constrained the programme, who watched the programme expand as a direct and predicted consequence of that abandonment, who then had a second deal on the table that went further than the first — that man chose to bomb what diplomacy had already solved, twice, and asks us to believe there was no alternative.
There was an alternative. He was looking at it. And he turned away.
Which means the nuclear threat was never the reason. If preventing a nuclear-armed Iran were the genuine objective, then Iran’s agreement to zero stockpiling and full IAEA verification — disclosed on American television the day before the strikes — would have ended the conversation. The problem would have been solved. The bombs would have been unnecessary. But the bombs fell anyway, because the nuclear argument was the justification, not the cause. Oman’s foreign minister, the man who had spent weeks mediating between the two sides, confirmed as much after the war began: the strikes were not prompted by an imminent threat but were “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.”⁸⁹
The nuclear threat was the label on the box. What was inside was something else entirely.
The Faith-Based Justification
In my article “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” published on the eighteenth of March, I documented the infrastructure that made this war legible — even desirable — to tens of millions of Americans.⁶⁶ The dispensationalist theology that reads Middle Eastern conflict as biblical prophecy unfolding in real time. The Pentagon prayer services. The commanders who told their troops, with grins on their faces, that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” The two hundred complaints across every branch of the military. I will not repeat that documentation here. Read it if you have not. It matters.
What I want to examine here is the specific theological narrative that the Iran war has activated — a narrative that goes beyond generic dispensationalism into something with a name, a history, and a political function. It is called the Cyrus narrative. And it is doing more work in this war than most Americans realise.
Cyrus the Great was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire — the first Persian Empire. In 539 BCE, he conquered Babylon and issued a decree permitting the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. For this, he is celebrated in Jewish tradition and is the only non-Jewish figure described as a messiah — an anointed one — in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 45:1 reads: “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him.”⁶⁷
In 2015, a charismatic preacher named Lance Wallnau took that verse and built a political theology around it. Wallnau, a figure in the New Apostolic Reformation who presents more like an infomercial pitchman than a holy man, published a book positioning Donald Trump as “God’s Chaos Candidate” — an unlikely, irreligious ruler chosen by God, just as Cyrus was, to advance the divine plan. The parallel was deliberate: Cyrus was not Jewish, not devout, not particularly interested in theology. He was a conqueror who happened to serve God’s purposes. Trump, in this framework, is the same — a flawed vessel through whom prophecy moves.⁶⁸
The narrative caught fire. Benjamin Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018, after Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.⁶⁹ Evangelical leaders adopted the framing with enthusiasm. Roughly a third of white evangelicals told pollsters they believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will.⁷⁰ And in January 2026, as the war loomed, even Reza Pahlavi — the exiled crown prince of Iran — invoked the “Time of Cyrus” alongside the “Time of Trump,” envisioning a transformative alliance that would reshape the Middle East.⁷¹
The irony should not be lost. Trump is being cast as a Cyrus figure — a Persian king, the founder of the civilisation whose modern inheritor he is currently bombing. The theology that celebrates Cyrus as God’s instrument for the liberation of the Jews is being used to justify the destruction of the nation Cyrus built.
But irony is the least of the problems. The real problem is what happens when this narrative meets the machinery of war.
In the first week of the Iran strikes, the FlashPoint television programme — a major platform for charismatic evangelical media — broadcast a series of episodes that treated the war as eschatological vindication. Wallnau declared that because of Trump’s war on Iran, “Israel and the return of Jesus is back on the menu.” He called it a “Last Days-moment” with “Cyrus Trump leading the greatest gentile nation in history.” Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit pastor who delivered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, called Trump “our modern day Cyrus” and said the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader had turned spiritual warfare literal: “That which people have been doing in the spirit, we saw it manifest in the natural.” He celebrated the killing of another human being by spending the day in the West Wing, mingling with the president’s advisers, telling his audience he could see “the angels surrounding” the Secretary of State.⁷²
This is not fringe theology confined to anonymous social media accounts. This is broadcast media, with direct access to the White House, celebrating the killing of a head of state as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and doing so while thirteen American families are burying their dead.
And then there is the projection.
On the fourth of March 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the press that “crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.”⁷³ This from the man who has held monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon since May 2025. The man whose personal mentor advocates Christian theocracy. The man whose commanders told troops the war was God’s divine plan to spark Armageddon. The man who declared at the National Prayer Breakfast that military service earns eternal life.
Hegseth accused Iran of being driven by religious delusion while presiding over a Pentagon where religious delusion was being broadcast on the department’s internal television network, posted on its official social media accounts, and preached from its podium. The accusation is not ironic. It is diagnostic. It tells you what the accuser sees when he looks in the mirror — and what he refuses to recognise as his own reflection.
The First Amendment is clear. The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁷⁴ These are not obscure historical footnotes. They are the foundational commitments of the republic in whose name this war is being fought. When foreign policy is driven by eschatology — when the decision to bomb a sovereign nation is legible to the decision-makers as the advancement of God’s prophetic timeline rather than a strategic calculation subject to rational scrutiny — it is not Iran that has a theocracy problem. It is the Pentagon.
The Media Narrative
Ask an American what Iran is and you will get one of a handful of answers. The ayatollahs. The hostage crisis. The nuclear programme. Terrorism. “Death to America.” A monolith — dark, fanatical, implacable. A nation whose more than ninety million people have been compressed into a single image: the bearded cleric, the burning flag, the chanting crowd.
There is no Iranian civil society in this picture. No women who risked their lives in the streets. No students who wrote on their university walls that the system had “taken our future hostage for forty-seven years.”⁷⁵ No poets. No filmmakers. No reformists who won elections and tried to open the country from within.
And no acknowledgment that those reformists were crushed, again and again, not only by the hardliners in Tehran but by American policy that handed those hardliners their best arguments. When George W. Bush declared Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” in January 2002, President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government was in the middle of the most significant opening in Iranian politics since the revolution. The reformists were reaching out. They were met with a label that empowered every hardliner who had warned that America would never accept a moderate Iran.⁹⁰ The pattern has repeated for decades: every time Iranian civil society moves toward openness, American policy delivers a gift to the forces that want to shut it down.
No Mahsa Amini — the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman whose death in the custody of Iran’s morality police in September 2022 sparked the largest anti-regime uprising since the revolution, and whose name became synonymous with a movement the world briefly noticed and then forgot. And no mention that Iranian women graduate in STEM fields at nearly three times the rate of American women, or that Iran has ranked first in the world for female engineering enrolment⁹¹ — facts that do not fit the image of a nation reducible to bearded clerics and burning flags.
When Amini was arrested by Iran’s morality police in September 2022, she died in custody three days later. What followed was the largest anti-regime uprising since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Protests erupted in over a hundred and fifty cities across all thirty provinces. Young women stood on cars and cut their hair. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” became a global rallying cry. The regime responded with the machinery it knows best: security forces using live ammunition, mass arrests, executions. Over five hundred people were killed. More than twenty-two thousand were detained. At least ten were executed after trials that international observers described as shams.⁷⁶
This was not a distant event. It was broadcast in real time on every social media platform in the world. The Iranian people — overwhelmingly the young, overwhelmingly women — showed the world exactly who they were and what they wanted. They wanted freedom. They wanted accountability. They wanted the regime gone. And they were willing to die for it.
And then the world moved on.
By late 2025, Iran was convulsing again. New protests erupted in December — described as the largest since 2022. Protesters chanted “Death to the Dictator.” Students at Shahid Beheshti University declared that the system “won’t be changed with reform or with false promises.” The government responded with the same playbook: live ammunition, heavy machine guns, snipers targeting heads and vital organs. A Tehran doctor reported that security forces were “shooting to kill.”⁷⁷
These are the people being bombed. Not only the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard commanders — but the people. The fourteen hundred dead in the first two weeks of Operation Epic Fury are not all regime figures. They include the women who marched under “Woman, Life, Freedom” and the men who stood beside them. They include the students and the shopkeepers and the mothers and the poets. They include the hundred and seventy-five people — most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve — who were in the Minab girls’ school on the morning of the twenty-eighth of February and were not alive by the afternoon.⁷⁸
And if there was opposition to the regime — and there was, in the streets, in the universities, in the protests that were still burning when the first bombs fell — the hundred and seventy-five dead schoolgirls in Minab crushed it. You cannot bomb a people into revolution. You can only bomb them into solidarity with the only power that remains standing. Every parent who pulled a child’s body from the rubble of that school is not thinking about regime change. They are thinking about who dropped the bomb. The strikes did not weaken the regime. They gave it the one thing it could not manufacture on its own: a reason for the Iranian people to stop fighting their government and start fighting ours.
The failure to distinguish between regime and people is not merely a media failure. It is the precondition for the war itself. You cannot bomb more than ninety million people if you see them as people. You can only bomb them if they have been reduced to a single word — Evil — and that word has been emptied of every human particular. The media narrative that presents Iran as a monolith is not incidental to the violence. It is the anaesthesia that makes the violence possible.
And the anaesthesia was applied at precisely the moment when the antidote was available. On the twenty-seventh of February 2026, Oman’s foreign minister appeared on CBS and told the American people that a peace deal was within reach. How many Americans saw that interview? How many cable news hours were devoted to the breakthrough compared to the hours spent on the threat narrative? The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi suggested that Al Busaidi went public deliberately — “so that the American people knew that peace was within reach when Trump instead opted for war.”⁷⁹ But knowing requires someone to tell you. And the machinery of American media was not built to tell you that the enemy was ready to negotiate. It was built to tell you that the enemy was coming to harm you.
The White House’s gamification videos — Call of Duty kill scores over real explosions, SpongeBob asking “do you want to see me do it again?” — are not a separate phenomenon. They are the media narrative’s logical endpoint. Once you have erased the humanity of more than ninety million people, the next step is entertainment. The “+100” hovering over a real explosion does not inform. It confirms. There are no people on the other end. Only targets. Only content. Only fun.
But the narrative is fracturing. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll conducted in the first week of March found that fifty-five percent of Americans see Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. Fifty-six percent oppose the military action. Among eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds — the generation raised on social media, the generation that watched the Mahsa Amini protests in real time — approval of Trump’s handling of Iran stands at twenty-five percent.⁸⁰ The monolith is cracking. Not fast enough. But cracking.
The Political Theatre
On the ninth of March, the Quinnipiac University poll reported President Trump’s overall approval at thirty-seven percent. His approval on the economy — traditionally his strongest issue — stood at thirty-nine percent, with fifty-eight percent disapproving. That was the highest economic disapproval Quinnipiac had ever recorded for this president.⁸¹ His approval on the situation with Iran was thirty-eight percent.
The war arrived at a moment when every other political metric was collapsing — and when the administration was haemorrhaging credibility on another front entirely. The Epstein files, released in waves since December 2025, had become a political crisis in their own right. By late January, the Department of Justice had published 3.5 million pages of documents in which Trump’s name appeared over three thousand times. Members of Congress who viewed the unredacted files reported content directly related to the president. On the sixth of March — one week into the war — the DOJ released additional FBI documents describing a woman’s allegations that Trump had sexually assaulted her as a teenager after being introduced to her by Epstein.⁹² The war did not make the Epstein files disappear. But it did move them off the front page.
And the question every honest observer must ask is whether the timing was coincidental.
War has always served domestic political purposes. It rallies the base. It changes the subject. It transforms the president from a politician into a commander-in-chief, and opposition from legitimate criticism into something that can be framed as disloyalty. Political scientists call it the rally-around-the-flag effect — the surge in presidential approval that typically follows the initiation of military action. George H.W. Bush saw his approval jump to eighty-nine percent at the start of the Gulf War. George W. Bush reached ninety percent after the eleventh of September. The effect is one of the most consistent findings in the study of American public opinion.⁸²
It is not working.
Nate Silver’s approval tracker, which aggregates multiple polls, found no rally-around-the-flag effect from the Iran war. Trump’s net approval moved from minus 13.5 at the start of March to minus 13.9 by the fourteenth — not a collapse, but not the surge that every modern wartime president has enjoyed. The war is not helping.⁸³ And the historical pattern — confirmed by the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq — suggests that once the initial window for a rally closes, public opinion only moves in one direction: against the war, and against the president who started it.
The fracture is visible even within Trump’s own coalition. Tucker Carlson — who was more muted after the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — called the March war “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Megyn Kelly expressed “serious doubts.” Fox News host Will Cain questioned the clarity of the mission.⁸⁴ These are not Democratic operatives or academic critics. These are the voices of the American right. And while they do not represent the majority of rank-and-file Republicans — seventy-seven percent of whom still support the strikes in the most favourable polling — the erosion is measurable. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found Republican support for the Iran strikes had dropped from sixty-nine percent during the June 2025 operations to fifty-five percent in March 2026. Forty-two percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to oppose the mission if American troops were killed or injured.⁸⁵ American troops have been killed. More will be.
Even Fox News’s own polling — conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company — found that fifty-one percent of voters believed Trump’s handling of Iran had made the United States less safe. Only twenty-nine percent said he had made it safer.⁸⁶
That twenty-nine percent floor is worth examining. It maps almost precisely onto the roughly quarter of the American electorate that identifies as white evangelical Christian — the same demographic whose theological framework, documented in this article and in “Holy War,” treats Middle Eastern conflict as biblical prophecy rather than policy. When the only Americans who believe the war has made them safer are the Americans who believe the war is God’s plan, the political calculation is not a calculation. It is a confession.
But if the base reveals the truth by what it celebrates, the administration reveals it by what it conceals. Trump has used the word “excursion” repeatedly to describe what is happening in Iran — the latest in a seventy-six-year tradition of creative language designed to avoid calling war what it is. Truman called Korea a “police action.” Obama called Libya “kinetic military action.” Trump calls a sustained bombing campaign that has killed over fourteen hundred people, destroyed an entire nation’s economic infrastructure, and assassinated a head of state an “excursion.”⁸⁷ The euphemism is not a verbal tic. It is a tell. It reveals that even the people waging the war understand it cannot survive contact with an honest description of itself.
The rally-around-the-flag effect depends on a precondition that no longer exists: national unity. The effect works because war, in its opening days, creates a moment of shared identity that transcends partisan division. But in a polarised electorate where everything — weather, vaccines, the shape of the earth — is contested along partisan lines, that shared identity is no longer available. There is no flag for everyone to rally around, because there is no everyone. There are only factions, each with its own media ecosystem, its own facts, its own version of the war. The rally effect requires a nation. America, at this moment, is not one.
And so the political calculation fails on its own terms. Thirteen Americans are dead. Over fourteen hundred Iranians are dead. The president who sent them to war is polling at thirty-six percent approval on his handling of Iran, fifty-four percent disapproval.⁸⁸ The war has not improved his numbers. It has not changed the subject from the economy. It has not unified the country. It has consumed the lives of American service members and Iranian civilians for a political return that is not merely diminishing — it was never there.
What Remains
Every argument for this war collapses under scrutiny. The nuclear argument is circular — the administration that abandoned the deal now bombs the programme its abandonment accelerated, while a second and better deal lay on the table. The faith-based argument is unconstitutional — a war legible to its architects as biblical prophecy is a war the First Amendment was written to prevent. The media narrative erases the people being bombed — compressing more than ninety million human beings into a target, a threat, a monolith called Evil. And the White House turned that monolith into a video game. And the political calculation treats American and Iranian lives as expendable currency in a domestic power game that is not even paying dividends.
So if the nuclear argument is circular, the theological argument is unconstitutional, the media narrative is manufactured, and the political calculation is failing — then what was this war actually for?
The answer was given to us before the first bomb fell, by the man who had spent weeks trying to prevent them. Oman’s foreign minister stated that the war was “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.” That assessment deserves to be taken seriously, because Al Busaidi is not a commentator. He was the mediator. He was in the room.
Israel’s interest in this war is not hidden and it is not new. Netanyahu has sought the destruction of Iran’s military capability for decades — not because Iran poses an existential nuclear threat that diplomacy cannot resolve, but because Iran is the last major regional power capable of challenging Israeli dominance in the Middle East. With Hezbollah decapitated in Lebanon, Assad toppled in Syria, and Hamas broken in Gaza, Iran was the final obstacle. The war is the capstone of a project that predates Trump, predates the JCPOA, and predates the nuclear programme itself: the reshaping of the Middle East into an architecture that guarantees Israeli supremacy from the Mediterranean to the Gulf. Netanyahu said as much himself. In his first press conference since the war began, on the twelfth of March, he listed his conquests — Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran — and declared that Israel was becoming a “global superpower.”⁹³ The mask did not slip. He took it off.
Saudi Arabia’s interest runs on a parallel track. The Kingdom’s rivalry with Iran is older than the Islamic Republic — it is a contest for regional leadership rooted in sectarian competition, oil politics, and competing visions of the Muslim world. Riyadh did not need to fire a single missile to benefit from this war. Every bomb that falls on Iranian infrastructure weakens Saudi Arabia’s primary regional competitor. The Saudis have managed the war carefully — absorbing Iranian retaliatory strikes on their territory while avoiding direct military involvement, positioning themselves to emerge from the conflict with their rival diminished and their own standing enhanced.
And waiting in the wings, as he has been for forty-seven years, is Reza Pahlavi — the exiled crown prince, son of the Shah whose dictatorship was installed by a CIA coup in 1953 and toppled by the revolution in 1979. Pahlavi is in direct contact with the Trump administration through special envoy Steve Witkoff. He has appeared on Fox News, CBS, and Lara Trump’s show. On the fourteenth of March — while the bombs were still falling — he declared himself ready to lead a “transitional system” the moment the Islamic Republic collapses. He is scheduled to speak at CPAC later this month.⁹⁴
The pattern is seventy-three years old. In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalised Iran’s oil industry. The CIA and MI6 overthrew him and installed the Pahlavi monarchy — a compliant dictatorship backed by American arms and the SAVAK secret police for twenty-six years, until the revolution that produced the very regime now being bombed.⁹⁵ The cycle is not hidden. It is the operating logic of American policy toward Iran: undermine every internal movement toward reform, ensure that the only alternatives are the hardliners or a Western-aligned exile, and then cite the hardliners as the reason for the next intervention. Khatami’s reformists were crushed by the “Axis of Evil.” The JCPOA was abandoned. The February 2026 negotiations were bombed. And each time, the man waiting to inherit the wreckage is a Pahlavi — aligned with Israeli and Saudi interests, promising democracy for a country he has not set foot in since 1978.
“Regime change” does not mean what the American public has been led to believe it means. It does not mean democracy. It has never meant democracy — not in 1953, not now, not ever. It means the installation of a government that serves the interests of the powers that installed it. The Iranian people have been trying to change their own regime — through reform, through protest, through elections, through revolution — for decades. They have been undermined at every turn, not by the absence of American intervention but by its presence.
These are not American interests. The average American — the reservist from Iowa, the sergeant from Nebraska, the pilot from Alabama whose twins will grow up without a father — has nothing to gain from the reordering of the Middle East in Israel’s favour or the advancement of Saudi Arabia’s regional ambitions. The thirteen dead Americans did not die for American security. They died for someone else’s project, sold to the American public through decades of theological conditioning, media narrative construction, and political manipulation so thorough that the people inside it no longer recognise it as manipulation. The four arguments dismantled in this article are not independent phenomena. They are the delivery mechanism — the packaging through which Israeli and Saudi strategic interests were translated into language that American voters, American soldiers, and American taxpayers could be persuaded to accept.
What remains when every justification has been stripped away?
What remains is force without reason. The thing that law — all law, from the earliest codes to the Geneva Conventions — was built to prevent. Part One of this series made the legal case. Part Two has examined the arguments that were supposed to supply the moral case, the strategic case, the democratic case. They are empty. What we are left with is what the law says we are left with: an act of aggression, undertaken by choice, against a nation that was at the negotiating table when the first bombs fell.
The promise of “Never Again” — the principle that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, from the death camps and the firebombed cities and the atomic craters — was never reserved for one people. That was its power. That was the entire point. “Never Again” meant that the international community would build a legal order robust enough to prevent the strong from devouring the weak whenever it suited them. It meant that the suffering of the few would be recognised as the concern of all, because the alternative — a world where sovereignty means nothing and power means everything — was a world that had already been tried, at a cost of eighty million lives, and found to be unsurvivable.
The law exists because empathy alone is not enough. Empathy can be switched off. It can be narrowed — reserved for those who look like us, speak like us, pray like us. It can be anaesthetised by distance, by euphemism, by a “+100” hovering over a real explosion. The law exists to hold the line when empathy fails. It exists to say: even when you do not feel the suffering of strangers, you may not cause it. Even when the media has erased their faces and the president has called their destruction fun, they are protected — not by your compassion, which is unreliable, but by a structure that does not depend on whether you care.
That structure is what is being dismantled. And what is lost in its dismantling is not only the protection of the Iranians being bombed today. It is the protection of everyone, everywhere, who might one day need the law to stand between them and a more powerful adversary. Including Americans. Especially Americans, who have more enemies and more to lose than any other nation on earth when the rules collapse.
A hundred and seventy-five people died in a girls’ school in Minab. Most of them were between seven and twelve years old. They were not combatants. They were not threats. They were not “enemy targets.” They were children, and they were in school, and they are dead. No nuclear argument justifies their deaths. No biblical prophecy justifies the means to this end. No media narrative can erase them, however hard it tries. No political calculation can destroy their lives and call it strategy.
They are the cost. Not of a policy disagreement. Not of a strategic miscalculation. But of the slow, incremental surrender of conscience that makes war possible when no honest argument supports it. The surrender happens in small steps. You accept the euphemism. You stop seeing the faces. You let the legal fiction pass unchallenged. You watch the gamification video and feel nothing. Each concession seems small — perhaps nothing. Perhaps even reasonable. But the arithmetic is unforgiving. What begins as a small accommodation to expedience ends as something else entirely. The word for it is old, and it is not fashionable, but it is precise: depravity. The state in which the machinery of destruction operates without resistance, because the conscience that might have resisted has been surrendered, piece by piece, until there is nothing left to resist with.
This is not only Iran’s tragedy. It is a test — of American law, of international order, of the principle that human life has a value that cannot be overridden by the calculations of the powerful. That test is being failed. And the failure reverberates — not only in the streets of Tehran and the rubble of Minab, but in the erosion of the moral authority that once made the world listen when America spoke, in the alliances fraying under the weight of a war no ally endorsed, in the economic instability that follows when the world’s reserve currency is wielded as a weapon and the world’s most powerful military is deployed without legal authority, and in the precedent — the quiet, devastating precedent — that tells every other powerful state on earth that the rules are optional, that sovereignty is a fiction, and that the strong may do as they please.
The struggle is not only for the people of Iran, though they are paying the highest price. It is for the soul of a nation that once believed it could be governed by law rather than by the will of the most powerful. It is for the idea — fragile, contested, never fully realised — that human civilisation can be organised around something better than force. And it is for each of us, individually, because the conscience that looks away today is the conscience that will not be there tomorrow, when the machinery turns in a direction we did not expect and the law we allowed to be broken is the one we needed most.
The law is not an abstraction. It is the infrastructure of a world in which Declan Coady’s family gets a phone call instead of a folded flag, in which Alex Klinner’s twins grow up knowing their father, in which a hundred and seventy-five girls in Minab finish their school day, go home, and one day complete their STEM degrees. Every argument for this war has failed. What remains is the choice: rebuild the law, or live in the ruins.
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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Banner image: Mass funeral for victims of US-Israeli strikes in Iran. Credit: Al Jazeera
Endnotes
⁵⁹ The JCPOA was finalised on 14 July 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany) plus the European Union. It was implemented on 16 January 2016 after the IAEA verified Iran’s compliance with initial commitments. For the specific constraints: enrichment limit of 3.67%, stockpile cap of 300 kg of low-enriched uranium, reduction from approximately 19,000 centrifuges to 6,104 (with only 5,060 enriching), redesign of the Arak reactor, and comprehensive IAEA monitoring. Council on Foreign Relations, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?”; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, “Fact Sheet: The Iran Deal, Then and Now,” updated June 2025; European Council, “Iran’s Nuclear Agreement — JCPOA.”
⁶⁰ Breakout time under the JCPOA estimated at over one year. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, op. cit. The IAEA confirmed that the JCPOA verification regime provided unprecedented transparency into Iran’s nuclear programme.
⁶¹ Trump announced the withdrawal on 8 May 2018 in a speech at the White House. The White House, “President Donald J. Trump is Ending United States Participation in an Unacceptable Iran Deal,” 8 May 2018.
⁶² General Joseph Dunford, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 26 September 2017. Pompeo’s acknowledgment of IAEA compliance findings reported in multiple outlets. FactCheck.org, “Trump’s Claim About the Obama Nuclear Deal and Iran’s Nuclear Development,” 12 March 2026.
⁶³ Iran exceeded low-enriched uranium stockpile limits by July 2019 and began enriching beyond 3.67% by the same month. It subsequently enriched to 60% and installed advanced centrifuges. The IAEA’s November 2024 report estimated breakout time at approximately one week. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, op. cit.; IAEA reports cited therein.
⁶⁴ Laura Rockwood, senior fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (28 years at the IAEA), quoted in FactCheck.org, op. cit. Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University and former special envoy for Iran at the State Department, quoted ibid.
⁶⁵ The negotiations timeline and Al Busaidi’s CBS appearance are documented in Part One, endnotes 52–57. Araghchi’s 25 February statement: Al Jazeera, “Iran’s FM says deal with US ‘within reach,’” 25 February 2026. Al Busaidi’s 27 February CBS appearance: CBS News, “U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’ Omani mediator says,” 27 February 2026.
⁶⁶ James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026.
⁶⁷ Isaiah 45:1 (English Standard Version). Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and issued the Cyrus Decree permitting the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem. The decree is referenced in 2 Chronicles 36:22–23 and Ezra 1:1–4.
⁶⁸ Lance Wallnau, God’s Chaos Candidate (Killer Sheep Media, 2016). Wallnau is a figure in the New Apostolic Reformation. The Cyrus parallel was central to his 2015–2016 advocacy for Trump among evangelical audiences. CBS News, Charisma magazine, and multiple outlets reported Wallnau’s framing. See also Contrarian News, “Why Do Christian Nationalists Support Trump War With Iran?” March 2026, for detailed reporting on Wallnau’s FlashPoint appearances during the Iran war.
⁶⁹ Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018, particularly in connection with the embassy move to Jerusalem. See CounterPunch, “Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War,” 6 March 2026; CBS News; Charisma magazine.
⁷⁰ Pew Research Center survey finding roughly a third of white evangelicals believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will, cited in CBS News and multiple analyses of evangelical political theology.
⁷¹ Reza Pahlavi’s invocation of the “Time of Cyrus” alongside “Time of Trump” in January 2026 statements and interviews. Wall Street Journal; Beit HaShoavah analysis, 18 January 2026.
⁷² FlashPoint TV broadcasts during the first week of Operation Epic Fury. Wallnau: “Israel and the return of Jesus is back on the menu”; “It’s about Cyrus Trump leading the greatest gentile nation in history, in a Last Days-moment.” Sewell: Trump as “our modern day Cyrus” who turned spiritual warfare literal. Documented in Contrarian News, op. cit., with detailed transcription of broadcast segments.
⁷³ Hegseth’s statement reported by Al Jazeera, “Why are the US and Israel framing the ongoing conflict as a religious war?” 4 March 2026. See also CAIR’s condemnation of the Pentagon’s “dangerous” and “anti-Muslim” rhetoric, reported in the same article.
⁷⁴ Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate on 7 June 1797 and signed by President John Adams. The full text of Article 11: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims]…”
⁷⁵ Students at Shahid Beheshti University, statement during the 2025–2026 Iranian protests. Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iranian protests,” citing Iranian press and protest documentation. The full quote: “This criminal system has taken our future hostage for 47 years. It won’t be changed with reform or with false promises.”
⁷⁶ The Mahsa Amini protests of 2022–2023: Amini was arrested on 13 September 2022 and died on 16 September. Protests spread to over 150 cities in all 30 provinces. Casualty and detention figures from Human Rights Watch, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, Amnesty International, and ACLED. Seven individuals were executed in connection with the protests as of spring 2023; the total reached ten by August 2024 (Amnesty International). See also UN OHCHR, “Justice and accountability: Woman, Life, Freedom protests,” April 2025, documenting crimes against humanity findings.
⁷⁷ The 2025–2026 Iranian protests began in late December 2025 and were described as the largest since 2022. Security forces used live ammunition, DShK heavy machine guns, and snipers. A Tehran doctor quoted in The Guardian (13 January 2026) reported that security forces were “shooting to kill.” The Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre cited evidence of forces targeting heads, eyes, and vital organs. Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iranian protests,” accessed 16 March 2026, citing The Guardian, IranWire, AP, and Human Rights Watch.
⁷⁸ The Minab girls’ school strike and casualty figures are documented in Part One, endnotes 10 and 13.
⁷⁹ Trita Parsi quoted in Common Dreams, “Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing,” 1 March 2026. See Part One, endnote 57.
⁸⁰ NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, conducted 2–4 March 2026, n=1,591 adults, margin of error ±2.8 percentage points. Fifty-six percent oppose military action; thirty-six percent approve of Trump’s handling of Iran; fifty-five percent see Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. Approval among 18–29 year-olds at twenty-five percent. NPR, “Poll: A majority of Americans opposes U.S. military action in Iran,” 6 March 2026; Marist Poll, “War with Iran, March 2026.”
⁸¹ Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted 6–8 March 2026, n=1,002 registered voters, margin of error ±3.8 percentage points. Overall approval: 37%. Economy disapproval: 58% (described as the highest Quinnipiac had ever recorded for Trump). Iran handling: 38% approve, 57% disapprove. Quinnipiac University Poll, release 9 March 2026.
⁸² The rally-around-the-flag effect is one of the most studied phenomena in American political science. See John Mueller, “Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 1 (1970); Marc Hetherington and Michael Nelson, “Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism,” PS: Political Science and Politics 36, no. 1 (2003).
⁸³ Nate Silver / Silver Bulletin, Trump approval tracker, accessed 16 March 2026. Net approval moved from −13.5 at the start of March to −13.9 by 14 March. Silver noted: “We’re no longer seeing a rally-around-the-flag effect… but Trump’s support hasn’t declined either.”
⁸⁴ Tucker Carlson quoted as calling the war “absolutely disgusting and evil” in CNN, “Analysis: How much is Trump’s base on board with war with Iran?” 3 March 2026. Megyn Kelly’s “serious doubts” and Will Cain’s questioning reported ibid.
⁸⁵ Republican support for Iran strikes dropped from 69% (June 2025 operations) to 55% (March 2026) in Reuters-Ipsos polling. Forty-two percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to oppose the mission if US troops were killed or injured. CNN, op. cit.
⁸⁶ Fox News poll conducted by Beacon Research (left-leaning) and Shaw & Company Research (right-leaning), 28 February–2 March 2026, n=1,004 registered voters, margin of error ±3 percentage points. Fifty-one percent said Trump’s handling of Iran made the US less safe; twenty-nine percent said safer. Overall foreign policy approval: 40% approve, 60% disapprove. Newsweek, “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating for Iran War Ahead by Double Digits: Poll,” 6 March 2026.
⁸⁷ Trump’s repeated use of the word “excursion” to describe the Iran war reported by NPR, “New poll shows Americans are skeptical of Trump’s Iran war,” 11 March 2026. The pattern of euphemism is documented in Part One: Truman’s “police action” (Korea), Obama’s “kinetic military action” (Libya), and previous uses of “consistent with the War Powers Resolution.”
⁸⁸ NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, op. cit. Thirty-six percent approve, fifty-four percent disapprove, of Trump’s handling of Iran.
⁸⁹ Al Busaidi’s post-war characterisation reported in Al Jazeera, “Oman renews push for diplomacy, says ‘off-ramps available’ in Iran war,” 3 March 2026. See Part One, endnote 55.
⁹⁰ President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, 29 January 2002, designated Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” At the time, President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government (1997–2005) had pursued a “Dialogue Among Civilizations” initiative, recognised by the United Nations, and had cooperated with the United States on intelligence sharing after the September 11 attacks. The “Axis of Evil” designation strengthened hardliners within Iran who had argued that engagement with the United States was futile and weakened the reformist movement that had won two consecutive presidential elections.
⁹¹ UNESCO data shows women account for approximately 35% of STEM graduates in Iran, compared to 12.7% in the United States as of 2021. In engineering, Iranian female enrolment has ranked first in the world; in science fields, second globally. UNESCO Institute for Statistics Data Browser; Snopes, “Checking claims about Iran’s female literacy, STEM graduate rates,” 26 June 2025; Purdue University School of Engineering Education, “The STEM Paradox: Why are Muslim-Majority Countries Producing So Many Female Engineers?”; Parhami, B., “Women in Science and Engineering: A Tale of Two Countries,” ASEE, 2021.
⁹² The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law on 19 November 2025. The DOJ released 3.5 million pages by 1 February 2026, including over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Trump’s name appeared over 3,000 times in the released files. DOJ, “Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” 1 February 2026. Members of Congress viewing unredacted files reported content related to Trump: Rep. Maxwell Frost stated he had only “scratched the tip of the iceberg” but that “a lot of these did relate to Donald Trump” (Wikipedia, “Epstein Files Transparency Act,” citing contemporaneous reporting). On 6 March 2026, the DOJ released additional FBI documents describing a woman’s allegations of sexual assault by Trump as a teenager after introduction by Epstein: Al Jazeera, “Epstein files with claims against Trump released by US Justice Department,” 6 March 2026. Trump’s approval on handling the Epstein case stood at 23% in a December 2025 Reuters poll.
⁹³ Netanyahu’s press conference, 12 March 2026 — his first since the war began. He listed Israel’s campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran and declared Israel was becoming a “global superpower.” Al Jazeera, “Netanyahu says Israel ‘stronger than ever’ in first speech since Iran war,” 12 March 2026; GlobalSecurity.org, “Statement by PM Netanyahu — 7 March 2026” (full translated text of his earlier address); Times of Israel, “Netanyahu says he doesn’t know if Iranians will oust regime, threatens new supreme leader,” 12 March 2026.
⁹⁴ Pahlavi’s contact with the Trump administration via Steve Witkoff: NBC News, “An exiled crown prince says he can lead Iran to democracy, but Trump hasn’t endorsed him,” 25 January 2026; The Hill, “Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi says he’s been in contact with Trump administration,” 14 March 2026. Pahlavi’s declaration of readiness to lead a “transitional system”: Fox News, “Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi announces readiness to lead Iran’s post-regime transition,” 14 March 2026. CPAC appearance: confirmed in The Hill, op. cit. CBS appearance calling for Trump to “intervene sooner”: CBS News, “Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi urges Trump to ‘intervene sooner’ so regime ‘finally collapses,’” 12 January 2026. The Nation described Pahlavi’s alliance with “an unsavory crew of authoritarians headed by US President Donald Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”: The Nation, “Trump’s Regime Change Fantasy Involves Bringing Back the Shah,” 8 August 2025.
⁹⁵ The 1953 CIA-MI6 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Operation Ajax / Operation Boot) is extensively documented. The CIA formally acknowledged its role in 2013. See Britannica, “1953 coup in Iran”; National Security Archive, “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup”; Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (The New Press, 2013). Mossadegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry in 1951. The coup installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose dictatorship lasted until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.