There Are No ‘Good Guys’ in the Iran War

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Being the good guy in a war isn’t easy. There are rules of engagement to follow and international treaties like the Geneva Conventions to abide by. The good guys can’t use certain weapons, and they have to go out of their way to protect civilians. In some cases, that means having to take greater risks to achieve an objective or not being able to do so altogether. And, ideally, they have a conscience.

Bad guys, on the other hand, aren’t constrained by any of those things.

They can kill indiscriminately. They can terrorize, torture, and rape. If they bother to take prisoners, they don’t have to treat them a certain way. And the bad guys don’t show remorse.

They can take embassy staffers hostage for more than a year, work with terrorist groups to hijack planes, slaughter civilians, use car bombs, target civilian infrastructure, and wreak havoc throughout the world.

They can fire missiles at schools, use white phosphorus munition, massacre 20,000 children in the span of a couple of years, use starvation as a weapon, kill the defenseless survivors of an illegal strike on a boat, and target aid workers, medical personnel, and journalists.

You may see where this is going.

Pete Hegseth has proudly declared that the US is done with “stupid rules of engagement” and “politically correct wars,” and that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.”

When it comes to the special military operation (or whatever the White House calls its war to obscure the fact that it is unconstitutional) in the Middle East, none of the three main protagonists — the US, Iran, and Israel — is the good guy.

Instead, all of them are “the baddies.”

In each case, it is a reputation that is well deserved.

In the case of the US, this isn’t just about Donald Trump. In the name of preserving the American way of life, many of his predecessors have overthrown democratically elected governments (including that of Iran), started wars, killed civilians, tortured enemies, and much more.

Make no mistake, the US has been a state sponsor of suffering across the globe for a very long time.

As an aside, if your reaction to this column is that you feel compelled to argue that Israel isn’t as bad as Iran (or vice versa), or that the motives of the US for all of the horrible things it has done were noble, then you are missing the point.

The bottom line is that you can try to be a force for good in this world or not. And, if you do, then there are certain rules you have to play by… rules that the US, Iran, and Israel routinely ignore.

We are not talking about a few regrettable missteps. We are talking about deliberate actions coming from the highest levels of the respective governments, actions that have cost the lives of countless innocent people.

This time around, that began in the earliest hours of the conflict, when an American missile hit a school and killed many dozens of girls. Exactly how many is hard to say because nothing any of the three governments say can be believed at face value.

And it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will ever reveal the whole truth about this incident. Was it an error or an accident? Our bet is that we will never know. 

After all, the US Department of Defense has tried to cover up things a lot less bad than killing innocent girls… and that was when the entire administration wasn’t rotten to the core and full of liars.

While the Pentagon’s official story is that the military is still probing what happened, government sources say the investigators believe it is likely that the US was responsible.

That is also the conclusion of an analysis from The New York Times, which was further supported by a new video showing a Tomahawk missile striking near the school.

In addition, Trump has come up with a cockamamie conspiracy theory suggesting that Iran bombed its own school, which might as well be an admission of guilt from the truth-challenged president.

While it seems extremely likely that this was inadvertent and not a malicious act, it is noteworthy that Secretary of Defense and former Fox News morning show host Pete Hegseth has proudly declared that the US is done with “stupid rules of engagement” and “politically correct wars,” and that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.”

Furthermore, Trump on Monday hinted that the US would start targeting civilian infrastructure in future strikes that would make it “virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again.”

In case, you are wondering, that would be a war crime.

Undoubtedly, people at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague are watching. We hope they are taking an especially close look at Hegseth. He likely has his job because he came to the attention of Trump, an avid Fox News watcher, when he advocated in favor of three US soldiers who were convicted or accused of war crimes. Trump commuted all of their sentences in his first term.

Of course, the problem with prosecuting US officials — or Israelis and Iranians, for that matter — in The Hague is that none of the countries in the current conflict are state parties to the Rome Statute, which sets out the ICC’s jurisdiction over war crimes.

It’s not hard to guess why: All three of them are routinely running afoul of those international treaties we mentioned above, which is also why they are r among the nations that haven’t signed on to many of them, like the landmine ban or a prohibition against using cluster munitions.

Back to our war.

Although Iranians were the victims in the destruction of the girls’ school, the regime in Tehran has been attacking nonmilitary targets throughout the region. In addition, its concern for the wellbeing of its civilian population rings hollow in light of the brutal crackdown on peaceful protests over the past couple of months that left thousands of its citizens dead.

If you want to find Iran in one of the many freedom or human rights indices, you can scroll all the way to the bottom. On the way, you’ll pass the US below the vast majority of its peer nations and, much further down, Israel.

Finally, Iran has been a major sponsor of terrorism over the past four decades and its proxies have indiscriminately killed countless people in Israel and wherever they could find American troops.

Speaking of Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week claimed that the difference between his country and Iran is that “the tyrants of Tehran target civilians.”

That would sound a lot more credible if his government had not engaged in a two-year killing spree in Gaza that has left tens of thousands of civilians, including more than 20,000 children, dead, and resulted in the ICC issuing a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Or if it hadn’t just blown up a bunch of Iranian fuel depots in an attack that engulfed Tehran in toxic smoke while alienating even the warmongers in Washington.

By the way, that, too, may be a war crime. Even if these depots had been military targets, the rules of war prohibit causing excessive damage to the environment.

We doubt that the Netanyahu regime cares.

Over the past two years, we would be hard-pressed to find a country that has committed more war crimes than Israel. And we likely will never find out the half of it because Tel Aviv banned reporters from entering Gaza independently and covering what was happening there.

Those who tried were often killed, like Amal Shamali this week.

All of this has caused an anti-Israel backlash in the US and elsewhere.

While antisemitism is once again on the rise on its own (a recent poll has shown that more than one-third of Republicans, and more than half of Republican men under the age of 50, believe that the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated or did not happen at all), that backlash is a reflection of Israel’s behavior over the past few years. 

As much as the Netanyahu regime tried to obfuscate what it was doing in Gaza, there are some things that are too big to hide — and killing 70,000 people in a place with a total population of less than 2.5 million is one of them. 

Therefore, it is hardly surprising that Americans’ sympathies in the conflict have flipped. A decade ago, four times as many of them sided with the Israelis than with the Palestinians. Now, for the first time ever, they view the Palestinians more favorably.

A diminished standing on the global stage is something else our baddies have in common.

The UK, Canada, and several EU countries have recently recognized the State of Palestine; Trump is doing his best to alienate the US’s western partners (and most of the rest of the world); and Iran’s “friends” have always been mostly business associates.

Unfortunately, none of that will result in a course change… at least not while the current regimes are in place. And whoever succeeds them will have their work cut out to convince the rest of the world that they have changed.

So, does that mean that it is a good thing that the bad guys are lobbing missiles and drones at each other?

Of course not. Because the vast majority of the people who are doing the suffering and the dying are innocent civilians.

And the fact that this isn’t giving pause to Trump, Hegseth, or Netanyahu — all of whom seem downright gleeful about their “successful” war — or whoever is now running the government in Iran, only shows that there are no good guys to be found in this conflict.