When people commit crimes, they often invent elaborate rationalizations to conceal or dilute the moral turpitude of the offense. Rapists notoriously claim that their victims asked to be raped, or enjoyed it during the act. Murderers cite the imperatives of retributive justice. Etc. When it comes to ordinary crimes, most people can see the gaslighting involved for the deception it is. Unfortunately, this tends not to be true of crimes by nation-states. A nation-state can commit an obvious, egregious crime in the plain light of day, lie about it in an obvious way, and be believed by millions of people.

That’s slowly what’s happening in the case of the US-Israeli attack on Iran. The attack (now possibly an imminent invasion) is an obvious act of initiatory aggression by two states against a third. There’s no discernible excuse for it, and no mitigating factors in its favor. The arguments for the war are in fact so implausibly absurd that its architects themselves seem to have trouble believing them or keeping them straight.

Americans may have trouble confronting the fact that they live in an aggressive gangster state, but as far as this war is concerned, they do. Little by little, though, what we’re seeing are subtle attempts to conceal or dilute this fact by re-description. What’s insidious and sad is that some of these attempts come from self-styled liberals claiming to criticize the war. In these cases, the rationalizations for US-Israeli aggression are subtly embedded within ostensibly sharp criticisms of the war. Though formulated at face value as criticisms, they’re written in such a way as to produce as much victim-blaming as critique of the aggressor.

Here’s an example from The New York Times, written by two veteran commentators. Though they start by making some good criticisms of the war, they go out of their way to add this gratuitous proviso:

Nevertheless, this war has emerged from more than Mr. Trump’s hubris. Iran, of course, bears ample responsibility, especially for sponsoring violent groups across the region and building nuclear capabilities. But the United States cannot escape blame.

Iran bears ample blame for being attacked, but the United States can almost, but not quite, escape blame for attacking it. One wonders how close a call the authors think this is.

Nothing in this passage either shows or even suggests how or why Iran bears any responsibility for being attacked. All governments engage in violence, and many sponsor violent proxies. That by itself shows nothing about the nature of the violence involved. An agent or entity only bears responsibility for being attacked when its own violence or sponsored violence consists in initiated aggression. Violence as such has no particular moral valence.

The authors make no attempt to show that Iran’s violence has been initiatory. They don’t even seem to grasp that some such demonstration is required to prove the claim they’re making. In fact, what they end up saying is consistent with the possibility that all of Iran’s violence and sponsored violence has been defensive in nature. If so, Iran would bear zero responsibility for being attacked. The authors’ argument, then, is as compatible with the conclusion they intend as with its denial. It literally proves nothing.

If the authors have some better argument somewhere waiting in the wings, they should feel free to haul it out and put it in print. But what they offer in the Times, as they must know, is embarrassing, handwaving bullshit, the kind of thing a criminal might blurt out during a confession to mitigate the severity of his crime. Sorry, but there’s no mitigating this crime: the attempt itself involves a kind of complicity in it.

The same thing can be said of the authors’ other laughable claim, that Iran bears responsibility for being attacked because it was “building nuclear capabilities.” Insofar as Iran built nuclear capabilities of a military nature, it had a perfectly good reason for doing so: its arch-enemy Israel had developed nuclear weapons first, and Iran believed that both Israel and the United States had hostile designs on it. So Iran’s nuclear capabilities can plausibly be seen as having defensive, deterrent intent.

Given that the US and Israel have now attacked Iran twice, it would seem that the Iranian belief about both regimes has been “amply” vindicated.  In any case, Iran’s nuclear capabilities were the subject of an agreement, the JCPOA, from which the United States withdrew, and were the subject of negotiations which the US aborted by treachery and aggression. So it seems downright stupid, to say they least, to bring up “nuclear capabilities” as evidence of Iran’s alleged “responsibility” for being attacked.

What we have here is plain old aggression, pure and simple. Aggression ad bellum is a crime against humanity. So the United States and Israel are prima facie guilty of crimes against humanity. There’s no need for well-credentialed commentators to engage in clever tactics of concealment or dilution for the record. What we need  are commentators willing and able to face the unvarnished truth about this war, and willing to make it plain to the American people. These authors have failed that test. So have a lot of others. They all have to be called out for it, no matter how hard they try to cover their tracks.