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In this first part of a multi-part overview of the war, I discuss the moral arguments behind the justification of the war. This is only the beginning of a series that I want to continue to write.
I hope you find this helpful and enlightening.
Trying to keep up with the pace of what is happening in this war is very challenging. There are several things I want to address in this essay, so here is the basic outline:
In this first part, I will address the justification of the war, from a moral point of view, a geopolitical point of view, and an inevitability point of view. I want to go through these arguments in a way that presents a clear picture. Then I want to go through the counter-arguments. These will be the arguments that are specifically countering the pro-war arguments. I want to examine these to see if they have merit. Then finally, I want to examine other arguments against the war that are not specific counter-arguemnts, and see what value they hold.
In the 2nd part, I want to address the logistics and supply issues that determine whether it will be possible for the USA to obtain its objectives in this war. In addition, I want to examine the economic, political, and security effects that could ensue as a result of how the war plays itself out.
The moral justification for the war
Before I begin, I want to preface this with the following. None of what you are about to read has any meaning if the USA and Israel cannot both fully win this war against Iran, and also put Russia and China at a significant strategic disadvantage in the process.
Let’s look at the nation of Iran in the big picture. From what I have read, the leadership of Iran is entirely from the Twelver Shia tradition of Islam. Article 12 of the Iranian constitution states, “The official religion of Iran is Islam and the Twelver Ja’fari school, and this principle will remain eternally immutable.” Twelver theology holds that the 12th Imam(aka the Islamic Mahdi or the Hidden Imam), is currently in “occultation,” and will emerge to rule Islam and the rest of the world in the end times. This belief system is embedded in the minds of the leaders of Iran.
There are several reasons this religious system manifests as an anti-American and anti-Israeli mission. First, the Twelver belief system holds that there is only one legitimate ruler of Islamic community – the Mahdi, or the 12th Imam who disappeared in 874 AD. Therefore, while awaiting his return no human being could legitimately rule the Islamic community, and so the Shia scholars in Najaf, Iraq, taught that Islamic clerics should guide society but should not rule the state. This became known as the “quietist” tradition in Shia theology , which became a predominant theological position for Shia Muslims for hundreds of years.
However, with the Iranian revolution in 1979, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, he developed the revolutionary tradition. This holds to 4 core principles:
* The Hidden Imam is the only rightful ruler
* He is currently absent during his time of “occultation”
* Islamic scholars under this school of theology are the ones who understand his divine law
* Therefore a leading Islamic jurist should wield political authority until the return of the Hidden Imam
Essentially this means that because the Hidden Imam is temporarily absent, Islamic jurists must rule in his stead. But not just any Islamic jurists – they must be from the Twelver belief system of Shia, and must be from Khomeini’s revolutionary school, because they are the only ones who truly understand God’s law. This is the doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurist, or Wilayat al-Faqih. Among Shia Muslims, scholars have estimated that around 90% of Shia are Twelvers, and of the Twelvers, only 15% of them hold to Khomeini’s Qom school of revolutionary ideology. The rest are quietists, who do not believe that clerics should rule the land.
So what this means is that under their belief system, the clerical rulers of Iran are on a divine mission, to protect the Islamic world while waiting for the return of the Mahdi. The supreme leader of Iran is therefore a deputy to the Mahdi, who is the Hidden Imam, appointed by Allah to rule the earth. Their mission, therefore, is uncompromising, even to the point of death.
To take this further, the Twelvers look at Western powers as forces of injustice and domination. Historically, the Western powers held spheres of influence in Iran for roughly a century. This influence grew in proportion to the building up of the Iranian oil industry in the 20th century. Foreigners ended up having a significant amount of influence over the direction of the country, and on the policies of the Shah, which contributed to the negative view people had of the Shah. Technically Iran had not been a colony of any foreign nation, but much of the Iranian intelligentsia felt that Iran was de-facto colonized by Russia in the north and Britain in the south. This intelligentsia ended up siding with Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to overthrow the Shah, even though not all of them were in agreement with the principles of Khomeini’s version of Shia Islam.
As the Twelvers came into power after the 1979 revolution, Western powers were viewed as forces of injustice, domination, corruption, and resistance to Allah’s rule through Islam. Therefore, Twelvers saw themselves as divinely appointed guardians for establishing Allah’s rule on earth. The primary avenue of resistance to this came from Western powers, who were associated with foreign commercial interests. While Western business leaders were focused on their business interests, the Twelver clerics and their growing followers in Iran increasingly saw these business interests as being antithetical to Islam. With the formation of the nation state of Israel, aligned with the West, it came to be viewed as an extension of Western unbelief. It was a Western intrusion and occupation of Muslim land, which prevents unification of Muslims worldwide. And of course, a fundamental understanding within the Twelver school of theology, is that their view is the only right view. Eventual unification of the world under Islam will begin with unification of the Islamic world.
If you understand the uncompromising religious belief of the Twelvers, it explains why the Twelvers who rule Iran are so brutal to anyone resisting their rule, and why they believe it would be right for them to obtain a nuclear weapon and use it against the forces that resist the rule of Allah. They are a single tightly bound religious community ruling over a wider religious community.
The rule of the clerics of Iran ruling over that entire country and having such a significant outsized influence over the rest of the Islamic world because of their power is highly problematic. Imagine if there were a Christian sect, such as the mid-20th century white supremacist Christian Identity movement, that managed to gain significant power and wealth, and then take over the leadership of a large area of the United States. Suppose, for example, they carved out their own semi-autonomous state in the Pacific Northwest region around Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Utah. Then imagine that they grew so powerful that their theology began to permeate other Christian traditions throughout the English speaking world. Then imagine that they became a sovereign nation, separate from the United States, and made public pronouncements claiming that it was their divine mission to dominate the entire globe with their version of Christianity, and it would be right to use political power to forcefully impose this on people everywhere. Then imagine that they were seeking to develop and obtain nuclear weapons.
The analogy is not too far removed from what Nazi Germany did in World War 2. While the Nazi version of political Christianity never had a significant impact on theological interpretations in the rest of the Christian world, they were seeking to politically dominate by means of military conquest, and they were seeking to develop nuclear weapons. At the end of World War 2, during the de-Nazification campaigns in Germany by the allies, there were many reports of defeated Nazis who never gave up their beliefs. Some of them moved to South American countries, some of them slipped quietly into the shadows, and some of them sought to develop underground movements that would keep the Nazi dream alive in a dormant state until the day the world would open up to them again. They held to their belief in Nazi ideology with extreme religious zeal, and many of them went to their graves still holding onto that belief.
This is very similar to the mindset of the revolutionary Twelver Shia clerics who rule over Iran. They have only grown in power and influence, while the Western world has been asleep, failing to recognize this growing danger. They follow the Islamic principle of taqiyya, developed by the Shia, which holds that it is morally justifiable to lie and use deception in order to further the cause of Islam and/or protect Muslims from harm. This is the basis for Iranian spokespersons saying for years that their pursuit of nuclear technology is for “peaceful purposes.” The entire world knows that they have been lying, and their intent has always been to develop nuclear weapons in order to use them. Since their stated enemies are Israel and the United States, as pronouncements against them form the foundation for clerics’ political legitimacy, it is not hard to guess who the targets would be if they ever got their hands on a nuclear bomb.
While Israel and the United States would be the primary targets, it does beg the question, would they use a nuclear bomb on other Muslim nations? While we cannot know for certain, it is plausible to imagine that they probably would. Given that they have no qualms about massacring tens of thousands of their own citizens at a time, most of whom are Muslims, and that they have been willing to launch missiles against their Muslim neighbors in Saudi Arabia and other countries, I expect that they would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against them as well. While they would use nuclear weapons against Israelis, Europeans, and Americans without remorse, the difference is they would see using the nuclear weapons against fellow Muslims as a sad but necessary endeavor. The fact that the Iranian Twelvers might feel bad about it would make no difference to the dead.
George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures had a really good explanation of this the other day. He talked about the possibility of what he called a “nuclear 9/11.” The idea is that in the same way that there was a completely unexpected attack on September 11, 2001, by Islamic terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center towers, imagine if someone did something similar, except with nuclear missiles instead of airplanes? How could they carry it out? It is not hard to imagine. Using sophisticated intelligence networks with the help of the Chinese and/or Russians, they could put a nuclear bomb inside a container on a foreign flagged container ship carrying goods for import into New York. The Port Newark Container Terminal is right across the mouth of the Hudson River from Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Once the ship is in the area, a containerized cruise missile with nukes could be armed and these cities could be attacked. Russia has already developed a type of containerized cruise missile called the “Club K” – a system that looks like a standard shipping container, but when it arrives at its destination, it can be armed and primed to attack. The feasibility of conducting such an attack is a bit far-fetched, but not impossible, especially for extremists.
Who would actually be willing to try and conduct such an attack? Knowing the character, history, and pronouncements of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and their willingness to sponsor terror activities all over the world, and their belief that it is their divine purpose to destroy America and Israel, it is not hard to imagine that they might actually try and do something like this. Imagine Russia sells them the technology to build a containerized missile system, China gives them the AI to smooth out the launch sequence and mitigate some of the human emotions that might get in the way of execution, and all of a sudden you have a very real system in place that could be extremely dangerous for the world.
So this brings us to the first point of the moral justification for the war against Iran. Based on their own pronouncements that they will never give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons, their publicly verifiable belief system that their divine mission is the destruction of America and Israel, and their trade relationships with Russia and China to obtain materials and expertise for weapons manufacturing, they had to be stopped. At least, it seems that this must be the reasoning behind the actions of the Trump administration’s launching of the war against Iran.
Looking at what has been uncovered so far, it is astounding. Iran has built up a massive arsenal and system of manufacturing of weapons. American and Israeli intel have found dozens of “missile cities” hidden underground for producing all kinds of missiles and drones that were intended to be used against Israel, America, and any countries that were willing to work with them. Iranian weapons makers were the early suppliers of Shaheed drones which Russia has used to devastate Ukraine. They have exported tons of missiles and drones to Hezbollah and the Houthis. So there is no indication that they were actually seeking any kind of peaceful activities. The Iranian economy is a huge mess, and the Iranian government has diverted all their resources to producing weapons. When their own people protested because they don’t have any money to buy food, instead of trying to help them, the security forces massacred over 10,000 of them. All for the sake of a Shia divine mission to bring back the Hidden Imam and usher onto the world a full Islamic republic to rule and bind all into submission.
It then begs the question, would it have been wiser to wait until Iran actually made another attack, so that we could operate in a defensive posture and have the moral high ground? Well, Iran made an attack through Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, and the entire world has repeatedly condemned Israel by saying their response was disproportionate (and I am not here to argue whether or not it was; the point here is to understand Israel’s mindset in opposition to the world narrative). Yet the condemnation of Israel didn’t take long to get going once the war in Gaza began. It started literally just a few days after Israel was initially attacked. While Israel was engaging Hamas in battle, a Hamas rocket went off course and hit a Palestinian hospital, killing dozens of Palestinians. Then Hamas released a statement saying it was an Israeli rocket deliberately attacking a humanitarian target, even though they knew it was a Hamas rocket. The press immediately ran with that story, and from that point on all of the mainstream media coverage had a condemning undertone towards the Israelis. This sets the tone for how Israel responds now. Israel feels like there is no point in trying to obtain the moral high ground in the eyes of the rest of the world, as they will never get it no matter what they do, even when 1200 of their citizens are massacred in cold blood.
So looking at the big picture, essentially we have had a genocidal death cult ruling the nation of Iran since 1979, sponsoring terror throughout the region, expanding their network, murdering dissidents, seeking to get nuclear weapons, and supplied and materially supported by the West’s 2 biggest adversaries – Russia and China. From a moral point of view, a war to eliminate this threat is something that is hard to oppose and could only do the world some good. Assuming, of course, that this is the right time to undertake such an endeavor.
But again, I reiterate, none of this has any meaning if the USA and Israel cannot both fully win this war against Iran, and also put Russia and China at a significant strategic disadvantage in the process.
The moral justification alone is not enough to fully justify the war. We must also look at other justifications, look at the practical feasibility of the war, and also consider the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order derivative implications to see if the war really will be good for the USA, good for Israel, and good for the world.
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To listen to the podcast episode on viewing the war from a Biblical perspective, click this link:
To read the substack episode on the beginning of the war, click this link:
In addition, I was reminded of the essay I wrote about Kharg Island in June of last year, when the 12 day war was happening. Looking back on it and then understanding what is happening now is very interesting. You can read that essay here:
Carl’s essay on the New World Order and history of the idea, really helps provide understanding:
Carl recently wrote a very helpful and informative essay last week about the new “Board of Peace” that has been in the news recently. The timing of that essay fits right in with what we are seeing today, in this action of Israel and the United States against Iran. You can read that essay here:
Here are some other links - Click one of the links below or copy and paste the URL beside the description into your browser.
Carl Teichrib’s book about the changing worldview landscape, titled “Game of Gods”, on Amazon
The entire geopolitical playlist from George
Some other links:
Orbis Sentry Rumble channel for Dayton Dialogue
Orbis Sentry Rumble channel for postings similar to this podcast
Full audio podcast link on substack
Full audio podcast RSS feed for podcast search engines
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