The US and Israel just started bombing Iran. I guess that it was to be expected, but I still cannot see it with a calm spirit. I guess that I am writing this to understand what I think about it all.

Maybe one should start with some history, but not with the Iranian revolution, as Trump did in his history lesson today. Rather with the 1953 coup—supported/organized by the US and the UK—against Mosaddegh, whose major sin seems to have been to nationalize the oil industry. Funnily, the reaction to Saudi Arabia doing very much the same was rather different. As it may be, after the coup, the Shah’s regime was not exactly a model of Scandinavian democracy, executing, torturing, and jailing opponents of all kinds. Also, although the numbers are controversial, thousands of people were killed, mostly by security forces, during the revolution of 1977-79. After the coup and before the revolution, Iran was a US ally, getting to buy a lot of weapons and such. After the revolution, relations went south fast, with the hostage crisis, the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, the open support by the US (and other western countries) when Saddam’s Iraq attacked Iran, starting a war that lasted 8 years, killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians (and Iraqis), and where Iraq used chemical weapons. In 1988, a US warship shot down an Iranian civilian passenger plane, killing 290 people. It was a mistake, but so were the shooting of a Korean plane by the Soviets in 1983, the shooting by Russian proxies in Ukraine of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, the shooting down by Iran of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 from Tehran to Kyiv in 2020, or the shooting down by Russia of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 when it was trying to land in Grozny. The reactions in the US to all those cases were, however, different than when the Iranian plane was shot down. While Reagan spoke about the “Korean airline massacre,” describing it as a “crime against humanity,” an “act of barbarism,” as “inhuman brutality,” and saying that it “must never be forgotten,” the closest he seems to have come to apologizing for the shooting down of the Iranian plane was when he answered “Yes” to a journalist who asked if he considered that a note regretting the loss of human life amounted to acknowledging wrongdoing. Anyways, relations between Iran and the US didn’t improve much after the ’80s, and after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Iran probably did all it could to meddle there, supporting some of the factions of what it looked like a civil war—a civil war that killed a lot of Iraqis and quite a bunch of American soldiers. In the meantime, Iran seems to have continued working on getting nuclear weapons, and lots of international sanctions were imposed to try to stop it. In 2015, Iran, the US, and a bunch of other countries agreed to a deal that meant that the sanctions were going to be gradually lifted, but that Iran had to stop its nuclear weapons program and accept continued monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The deal was controversial from the very beginning—basically, Israel didn’t want a deal that didn’t stop Iran from supporting Hezbollah & Co.—and although the International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iran was abiding by it, the US withdrew from the deal and imposed hard sanctions on Iran, forcing other countries to tag along. As a consequence, Iran sent the International Atomic Energy Agency packing, and since then, the US (and Israel) have been trying to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program by sabotage, getting rid of nuclear scientists and involved military personnel, and by bombing, as in the spring of 2025. It is clear that there is not much love between the Iranian and the US regimes. (Incidental question: why does one not usually apply the word “regime” to the US, France, or Spain, but one does to other countries?)

Now, all of that was about the US, and it would take a similarly long paragraph to give even the shortest summary of Israeli-Iranian relations. Trying to be fast, Iran has been supporting some of the most undesirable groups of people in the world: Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and bunches of similarly quasi-political terrorist entities in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, you name it. Many of these groups focus on Israel and seem willing to do whatever it takes to destroy Israel. Israel pays in kind, and it is kind of understandable that it does not feel like calmly waiting for the next bunch of missiles being lobbed onto them by some Iranian proxy or another. It is also understandable that Israel makes a priority of preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, even if it is to not have to worry whether there is a 1% probability of a bunch of crazy, old, religious freaks deciding that Tel Aviv has to be wiped out of the map, whatever the consequences are.

So, here everybody has given enough reasons to everybody to hate the other one. And so what seems to have happened is that the US and Israel see a possibility of really damaging the people in power in Iran, maybe even being able to get rid of them altogether. In other words, what is happening is that two countries are bombing another country they have not liked for a long time just because they feel they can get away with it, not giving any justification, and putting “regime change” as their goal. It is illegal whatever interpretation you give to international law, but really, nobody would cry if those in power in Iran disappeared into thin air. Indeed, it seems hard to come up with any redeeming features of the Iranian regime. I mean, during the protests in the last few months, the regime killed thousands of people. Many more were arrested, and some of them executed. In 2022, hundreds died during protests that started after a 22-year-old who had been detained for not properly wearing the hijab died in police custody after having been beaten up. Hundreds were also permanently blinded when the police started shooting pellets directly into the faces of protesters. Apparently, they also directly aimed at genitals, again to cause permanent damage. In 2019-20, again, 2000 protesters were killed during, at first, peaceful protests that started because of fuel prices. I assume that one could continue this list, but I guess that the point is clear: the Iranian regime treats its own population in the most violent, repressive, cruel way. They are a bunch of assholes that nobody would miss if the Earth just happened to open up beneath their feet. Besides that, I am not an ideological pacifist who thinks that all alternatives are always preferable to war: as far as I can see, the people who say that for violence you need two are the same people who have the luxury of being sure that nobody else is going to go violent on them. However, once all that has been said, this war on Iran fills me with dread. I do not see what good can come from it, and in fact, I can see a huge risk of it having horrible consequences.

This war fills me with dread. In part, it is the record of those doing the bombing. Israel has proved over and over and over that it does not give a shit about the well-being of anybody else. After relentlessly claiming that it was all anti-Semitic propaganda, Israel seems to be accepting that the IDF killed 70,000 Gazans, and this without counting those who are missing. Besides, at least since 1967, Israel has been treating Palestinians in a way that only makes sense if the goal is to drive them out of Greater Israel, the politically correct version of “from the river to the Sea.” Over the years, Israel has repeatedly invaded Lebanon, bombed Iraq, Sudan, Iran, and Syria countless times. Israel has killed or kidnapped people—something called state terrorism when Russia does it—in Tunisia, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, North Korea, Belgium, Cyprus, Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Dubai, Italy, Malta, Norway, the UK, Ukraine, Uruguay, Brazil, Egypt, Qatar, and uncountably many times in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Not all, but many of the people targeted in those killings and bombings were highly despicable and a threat to Israel, but what is clear is that Israel has clearly shown itself ready to do whatever it thinks that it has to do, without being bound by any kind of niceties, and without caring in the slightest about the consequences for other people. One can discuss whether this is justified or not, but it is a fact. One can therefore be sure that Israel is not going to care in the slightest for the human cost outside of Israel of whatever is done in Iran.

The US has a somewhat better record than Israel because even when its actions have had really horrible consequences—think of Afghanistan or Iraq—there was a serious, decent, although a posteriori clearly misguided effort to improve the lives of people in whatever country the US intervened in. However, the current US administration—sorry, regime—is enormously immoral and makes a show of laughing at the idea of principles. At the same time, the attention span seems really small, and it seems most likely that they are unwilling to make the effort and put the money needed to even try to do anything else than bombing. In fact, if I were the Iranian government, I would be thinking that what I have to do is to just survive for a month or two, that by then Trump is going to be tired of headlines being about Iran, that he is going to declare victory regardless of what has actually happened, and that he is going to move on to do something else. Still putting myself in the position of the Iranian government, I would be thinking how to symbolically hit back, making it look like the underdog who puts up a fight, lobbing missiles and drones here and there to make people run into bunkers in Tel Aviv, to make airlines cancel flights because airspaces are closed, to disturb maritime traffic in the Red Sea and the Hormuz Strait, to increase the price of gas Americans pay at the pump, and such things. But besides symbolically hitting back, if I were the Iranian government, I would be thinking that by bombing, the US and Israel can destroy military installations, can destroy ballistic missile factories, can destroy nuclear installations, but it cannot take away the guns, the clubs, and whatever the police and paramilitary forces use to stop protests. So, my main worry would be to avoid being personally killed, thinking that if I survive, no bombing is going to threaten my personal power. Now, if one supposes that the US and Israel are not purely doing this for cynical inner political reasons, they could be aiming to get a large part of the Iranian regime to decide that enough is enough and stage a coup, and if I were the Iranian government, I would also be worried about that. Again, the goal would be to survive a couple of months, because that is all the staying power I would think I would need with the current US administration in power.

Now, I just mentioned two possible outcomes:

  • The Iranian government stays in power, with fewer ballistic missiles but in power, and going totally brutal against anybody who looks like they are not being totally behind them.
  • There is a coup from inside the government against the government. In this case, it is possible, but far from a given, that Iran would change, but most likely it would be a bit of the same, at least when it comes to domestic politics.

There is, unfortunately, a third possibility:

  • Some sort of civil war, like in Libya, in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, where some people think that the government is very weak and that it is time to topple it, while the government still has enough power to fight back.

What I definitely don’t see happening, although I know nothing, is for a most brutal regime to give up power without a fight, mostly given that the destroyed or to-be-destroyed ballistic missiles are not exactly what you need for riot control. In any case, most likely Iran will come out of this less able to lob missiles elsewhere, but unless this ends really fast with a symbolic empty victory lap by Trump, it has the potential to cause an incredible amount of suffering within Iran. Neither Israel nor Trump will give a fuck about the worst consequences, whatever they are, but thinking of what can happen sickens me. It also sickens me to think that for every missile that flies out of Iran, we will get to see 37 pictures of people running to bunkers or of air defense shooting them down, but that we will not get to see anything of all the “collateral damage” in Iran. It sickens me because it is also clear to me that all of this is being done for pure inner political reasons. Nobody would cry if the earth opened beneath the feet of the entire Iranian government, and I would definitely also not cry if Netanyahu and Trump decided to also fall in, in solidarity. For the sake of decorum and discretion, I would then vote to give that place a slightly opaque Latin name like Stercus Chasma.