It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the Trump Administration is contemplating some sort of ground-based military action against Iran, presumably to free the Strait of Hormuz for navigation, or more precisely, to wrest control of the Strait from Iran. I can’t stress enough the need to oppose this action, as loudly and vehemently as possible. In an earlier post, I suggested that we’re going to need a bigger anti-war movement. I’m willing to amend that: for now, we just need an anti-war movement, (almost) any anti-war movement, except that it has to make its appearance sooner rather than later. The No Kings movement, which tends to have good resources and organizational capacities, is organizing rallies this weekend, starting Friday evening. My advice? Go. 

I understand that people have ideological reservations about No Kings, many of them perfectly valid. And I grant that not all of No Kings’s energies this weekend will be devoted specifically to the anti-war cause. I don’t think any of that matters. A movement has to start somewhere, and if it begins by piggy-backing off of the deep pocketed organizational resources of No Kings, that’s fine. If you go to a No Kings rally, but have reservations about it, bring your own messaging, and do your own networking with ideologically like-minded people, and you’ll be ideologically above reproach. There’s no reason to leave your ideological scruples at home; the more important thing is to ensure that your scruples don’t keep you at home. Staying home isn’t conscientiousness in this context. It’s self-defeat.

The Iran War is a tour de force of wrongness. For one thing, it violates every principle of just war. As an act of initiatory aggression, it violates the principle of jus ad bellum. Because it targets civilian infrastructure, and does so within the context of a deliberate and declared policy of refusing to discriminate sharply between combatants and non-combatants, it violates the principle of discrimination, i.e., jus in bello. Because its architects have no rational plan for what’s to happen after the war ends, it violates jus post bellum.

Beyond that, the war is clearly unconstitutional, bypassing Congress’s right and duty to declare war rather than permit the President unilaterally to wage one on a whim. Beyond that, no one has articulated a coherent rationale for the war (though many have “articulated” a series of incompatible pseudo-rationales for it). And on top of all that, the war is all but lost already. The United States’s primary strategic asset in any overseas war is its economy, but Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz ensures that that weapon will be degraded to the point of ineffectuality or worse. 

And the idea of a military option for opening the Strait is dangerously delusional. If you want a sense of why, read Harrison Mann’s “Seizing Iran’s ‘Crown Jewel’ Would Be a Suicide Mission,” and Caitlin Talmadge’s “The Hormuz Minefield.” Mann argues that a military option is essentially impossible; Talmadge argues that success is highly unlikely, and will only come, if at all, at enormous cost to all involved parties. I lean toward Mann’s interpretation, but it doesn’t really matter. Either interpretation or both leads to the same conclusion: don’t do it. 

There is, on top of this, the very real risk of escalation to the use of weapons of mass destruction, not by Iran, but by Israel or the United States. We already have politicians both in the US and in Israel normalizing the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict. They’re not normalizing nuclear talk because they want to be cute. They’re normalizing it to facilitate the actual use of nuclear weapons in this war, and to ensure our docile acceptance if and when it happens. A war really couldn’t get worse than this. It’s worse than Vietnam, and worse than Iraq. It’s a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact for the 21st century, except that this time, the aggressors have nuclear weapons.

We are, without exaggeration, at the edge of an abyss–some version of the Sicilian Expedition from Thucydides, or Gallipoli, or Vietnam, or Iraq under the second George Bush. Pick your favorite analogy. There’s probably no stopping either the American or the Israeli administrations, but we have a duty to try, even if we’re bound to fail, as we likely are. There’s not much of a window before a ground invasion begins. Some statement has to be made before that happens. The time is now.