A recent article in The New York Times by its so-called “national security correspondent” is an indication of how incompetent mainstream journalists are, and how unreflectively eager they are to do the bidding of the national security establishment they supposedly cover. The article is “Iran Could Direct Proxies to Attack U.S. Targets Abroad, Officials Warn,” by Eric Schmitt. Nothing in it is newsworthy or news. All of the work in it is done by its brainless and tendentious reliance on the term “terrorism.”

There are three criteria by which wars are judged as justified:

1. Ad bellum criteria: is it just to go to war?
2. In bello criteria: are the tactics used in the war just?
3. Post bellum criteria: is the ultimate intended outcome of the war justified?

It’s painfully obvious that the imminent U.S. war on Iran fails on all three criteria. It fails (1) because it’s an unprovoked act of aggression by a party that unilaterally pulled out of–reneged on–a security agreement it had made with the other party. It likely fails (2) because if it’s like the last American attack on Iran (Operation Midnight Hammer, last summer), it will likely show little consideration for civilians and kill plenty of them, just like last time. Indeed, the imminent attack is likely to be bigger and more prolonged than the last one, which may well result in an even higher civilian casualty count than last time. And it fails (3) because the object of the war is regime change with zero bona fide interest in the welfare of the Iranian people.

A war fails just war criteria if it fails one of the three just war criteria. The imminent US war fails all three of them–and not in a particularly subtle way. Yet Schmitt casually refers to this imminent war in entirely neutral terms as a “campaign,” an “attack” or a series of “strikes.”

Now consider the hypothetical Iranian counter-attacks that are the subject of the article. They’re described as responses to the American attack, so they’re bound to be defensive in nature and will therefore satisfy ad bellum criteria. They’re described as targeting military or governmental targets, so they likely satisfy in bello criteria as well. And while the survival of the Iranian regime doesn’t precisely satisfy post bellum criteria, it’s arguably better than whatever chaos the Americans have in mind for Iran. So comparatively speaking if not absolutely, the Iranians do better on criterion (3) than the Americans. Putting all of these points together, it seems obvious that the prospective Iranian response is more justified than the prospective US attack.

Yet where Schmitt refers to the imminent US attack in neutral terms, he insists on referring to the would-be Iranian counter-attacks as “terrorism.” As far as Schmitt is concerned, it’s not terrorism to initiate a war that violates all three criteria of just war, but it is terrorism to respond to a war of aggression even by the most targeted, appropriate, and discriminate measures available.

The mosque at Isfahan (photo credit: Patrick Riggenberg, Wiki Commons)

The message here is obvious. The only thing that differentiates the neutral “strikes” from the “terrorist attacks” is the fact that if we abstract entirely from all just war criteria, the initiatory strikes are being carried out by the United States whereas the retaliatory response to them is being carried out by Iran. The unstated assumption is that whereas the United States is presumed to be definitionally incapable of terrorism, Iran is presumed to be capable of nothing but terrorism. When the United States initiates a war of aggression, the aggression becomes a mere “attack,” but when Iran responds, the response becomes “terrorism.” By definition, we are never terrorists; they always are.

Since the article says literally nothing of note—only an idiot needs to be informed that if the United States attacks Iran, Iran will respond–its only real purpose is to reinforce this axiom, to do so with the presumptive “authority” of a seasoned “national security correspondent,” and to pretend that printing such a piece in the country’s paper of record is something other than an exercise in the manufacture of consent. Strip away the transparent double standards involved, however, and there’s nothing else for Schmitt’s article to be but propaganda in the service of state aggression.

One of the great pretenses of American journalism is the belief that it does an impartial job of reporting “the facts,” where the facts in question are all value-neutral. Once you introduce value-laden, ideological terminology, we’re told, you’ve left factual territory and entered the land of mere “value judgments.” Facts are facts, but value judgments are not, so it’s best to stick to facts and leave value judgments out of the equation.

But close attention to Schmitt’s use of “terrorism” shows how empty this precept turns out to be. “Terrorism” is one of the most ideologically and normatively charged terms in the political lexicon. To use it is ipso facto to condemn any act that falls under it and to invite a lethal response. If you and I are in a fight, and I successfully convince people that you’re a criminal and I’m not, I’ve won the day even if I’m the one starting the fight. It doesn’t seem so bad to start a fight with a criminal. Think of all that criminality I might be responding to. So if people can be convinced that you’re a criminal, my aggression will be trumped by your criminality and serve to conceal or dilute my aggression. Likewise, if you and I are regimes, and I convince my audience that your regime engages in terrorism and mine doesn’t (indeed, can’t), I’ve won the day even if I’m starting a war with you. My aggression will be trumped by your terrorism and be eclipsed by it. This fact stares us all in the face—all of us except those supposedly paid to notice it, like Eric Schmitt.

For all his supposed experience in reporting national security issues, Schmitt shows no awareness of this obvious set of facts. He shows so little awareness of it that it’s hard to suppress the thought that he’s working to evade it. He uncritically regurgitates Pentagon and White House talking points about Iranian and Iranian proxy terrorism (quotation after quotation) as though it had never occurred to him that once you describe things that way, you’ve loaded the dice: you’ve effectively concealed the fact that the United States is about to initiate a war of aggression by focusing on the “terrorism” it supposedly faces.

But it isn’t “terrorism” to respond with force to an act of aggression, and it won’t be “terrorism” for the Iranians to attack us if we attack them first. Attacking us will, to use that much beloved Israeli phrase, simply be an exercise in Iranian self-defense against American aggression–however terrifying that may be for the aggressors. It’s telling that while Schmitt freely refers to hypothetical Iranian actions as “terrorism” at no point does he refer to an imminent American attack as aggression. And yet as a purely factual matter, that’s what it is.

Articles like Schmitt’s, otherwise inconsequential, underscore the importance of a point I’ve made before. If you want to understand warfare, you have to come at it the right way. That means coming at it with the right conceptual framework, which is what just war theory is. You have to ask the right questions ahead of time, then conceptualize what the right answer might look like in principle. If you don’t, you’re like a child trying to figure everything out from scratch every time you face the same damn thing for the nth time in a row. Unfortunately, that’s what the American people have become under the influence of reporters like Eric Schmitt. It’s time to break their influence by breaking some old habits and cultivating new ones.

What’s terrifying here is not so much Iranian “terrorism” per se as the thought that we deserve it. But if we attack them, we will deserve it, and having attacked them before, we do. Or rather, those of us deserve it who have either helped initiate the attack on them, or become complicit in it. That isn’t literally all of us, but it’s enough of us to make plenty of us a target.

And unpleasant as the thought may be, the Iranians probably aren’t thinking too hard about how to differentiate the one set of us from the other. Doing so, after all, is easier said than done. Can the average American tell where his or her neighbor stands on the impending attack on Iran? If not, how could the average Iranian, or even the average Iranian general? If we can’t easily differentiate the complicit from the innocently entangled amongst ourselves, don’t expect them to. Just expect all hell to break out with the usual results, for people to be momentarily amazed at the brutal carnage of war, and then for people to be lulled into amnesia about what just  happened–so that it can happen all over again.