Wars of Choice

I have too many friends cheering on this war. Mostly supporters of Israel.

I get it. Israel has been in a de facto state of war since its founding—attacked or threatened from all sides. My Israeli friends are tired of being on the defensive. It feels good, for once, to take the initiative. To demonstrate strength.

With Iran, it’s long been a war through proxies—the dirtiest kind of war. So they say: bring it into the open. Get it over with. The regime is vulnerable, the timing is right—do it now, on our terms.

It makes sense—but only if you win.

And in this case, there’s really only one definition of “win”: regime change. Not just any regime change, but one that produces a more moderate government—one willing to abandon the revolutionary project and rejoin the international community.

That’s a lot of “ifs.” A lot has to go perfectly. It's the equivalent of drawing a royal flush from a deck of 52 playing cards. Wars have a way of going sideways—not just sideways, but in every terrible direction at once.

We’re seeing that happen now, in real time.

That’s part of why I never cheer for war, and I’m not cheering for this one.

The first reason is obvious: death and destruction. It’s always the most vulnerable—on both sides—who pay the highest price.

But there are times when war is justified. As a last resort. Which begs the question; how do you know when it’s a last resort?

Self-defense is the clearest case. If you’re attacked, you have no choice but to defend your sovereignty and your people.

Another case is when good-faith diplomacy has been exhausted—when there’s an unbridgeable impasse. War becomes, however tragically, a means of resolving a political dispute.

A preemptive war can sometimes be justified if it is genuinely defensive—if there is a credible, imminent threat.

But “wars of choice” are, by definition, not last resorts. They are elective. And calling them that is often a euphemism for something morally indefensible and legally unjustifiable.

That’s why the claim that the U.S. had to strike Iran preemptively—because of an imminent attack on American assets—matters so much. If that claim is false, then the justification collapses.

Another argument was that Israel was going to act regardless, and the U.S. needed to move first.

But that doesn’t hold.

If Washington was concerned about being targeted, it could have objected and stayed out. If Israel proceeded anyway, the U.S. could have maintained distance. If Iran then chose to respond by striking American targets, a U.S. response would clearly fall under self-defense.

More likely, Iran’s response would have been calibrated—symbolic, as we’ve seen before—precisely to avoid escalation.

That’s not the path that was taken. The U.S. chose to go to war.

That decision is not equivalent to Israel’s. If the goal was to support Israel, there were many ways to do so that did not involve sending bombers.