David French on the “legal and moral justifications for war” against Iran:

There is little question that we have many legal and moral justifications for war. When Trump spoke about Americans killed by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, that struck home for me. We lost men in my own unit to Iranian-backed militias using Iranian-supplied munitions. I knew those men, and I will never forget the terrible days when they fell.

In other words, twenty years ago, the United States initiated a war of aggression against Iraq premised on florid, systematic lies. The victims fought back, killing some of the aggressors. In answer to those acts of self-defense, we’re now obliged to initiate yet another war of aggression, this time against Iran, eliciting yet another round of defensive attacks by the successors of yesteryear’s victims.

These defensive attacks have so far cost six American lives, and will undoubtedly cost many more. Presumably, the lives lost can be banked to justify yet another war of aggression when the need arises a few decades from now. All we have to do is reverse cause and effect so as to reverse the order of aggression and defense. Once we do, we’re home free: up has become down, black has become white, aggression has become defense (and vice versa), and war has become peace. As one pair of enthusiasts puts it, war requires “flexibility.” Machiavelli would approve, not only of the need for flexibility, but of the essential phoniness of the exercise.

“Man hands on misery to man,” Philip Larkin famously wrote. “It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Larkin’s solution was suicide. Mine is to throw the misery back at the people handing it to us. They can only hand us misery, after all, if we accept what they’re dishing out. We have the obligation, then, to reject their rationalizations, and while we’re at it, to make them as miserable as they’re trying to make us. The misery they create may still deepen like a coastal shelf, but at least no one can tell us it’s ours.