It’s sad and telling that with respect to both the US attack on Iran in June 2025 and the current attack on Venezuela, few if any commentators, whether supportive of the United States or opposed, have described what happened in essential terms. In both cases, the United States committed an unprovoked act of aggression against a country that had not initiated aggression against it. Put another way, the United States deliberately breached what had previously been a condition of peace between the two countries on the unargued premise that it had the moral right to attack its perceived enemies at will, regardless of anything they may or may not have done to warrant an attack. There are other things worth saying about both cases, but nothing more fundamental than that.

Illustration credit: Chorchapu, Wikipedia

What’s sad and telling is how obvious and uncomplicated it is that the United States is the aggressor, and yet how little this fact is ever mentioned in discussions of either case, particularly in “mainstream” discussion. Side issues are discussed to death. Circumlocutions are employed to allude to aggression without mentioning it. Retrospective justifications are offered for why the military operation at hand led to desirable consequences that should induce us to forget how it was brought about. But the most obvious, salient, relevant fact–that it was a blatant, obvious, unprovoked act of aggression–is rarely if ever stated in a way that does justice to the facts. Neither are its implications. No wonder the fact of aggression is never grasped, and its implications never drawn. You can’t grasp what you habitually evade. And this fact is.