W While the intervention against Venezuelan President Maduro took only a few hours, the intervention against the Iranian mullah regime has now lasted more than three weeks. And still it remains unclear how to evaluate this action, how to judge this war. Indeed, more: it is increasingly evident that the evaluation of the war is, in a sense, impossible. For it harbors an absolute ambivalence.
The only clear thing is that the attack by the United States and Israel on Iran, beginning with the decapitating strike against the state leadership, was not legally legitimate. It neither conforms to international law, nor did it meet internal political legitimacy. That means: there was neither a UN mandate nor a Security Council resolution. Only Trump’s “gut feeling” (recently he even says he feels it “in the bones”!). This has been noted many times.
Instead, something else came into play: morality. To be clear: Morality serves as a substitute for the law.
Isolde Charim is a publicist in Vienna.
And she has the emotional evidence on her side. For every—really every—comment emphasizes: to the brutal mullah regime that mercilessly massacres its own population, one does not shed a tear. And didn’t these religious fanatics build their policy on absolute categories? They have indeed labeled the United States as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan,” whom it must be wiped out.
Brothers in the Same Spirit
So it is true what Israel’s former Prime Minister Jair Lapid wrote: “Finally, a just war” (even if not legitimate)?
And that is precisely where the ambivalence begins.
Not only because of the actors: Trump and Netanyahu – brothers in the same spirit – as guardians of morality? Bearers of justice? Protectors of human rights?
When Trump speaks of the “terrorist regime of Iran” and calls the Iranian leadership “disturbed bastards” (to kill them is an honor to him), that, in its absurdity, recalls Putin, who expresses moral outrage over the internationally unlawful attack on Iran.
But not that authoritarian rulers present themselves as liberators, which is what makes the fundamental contradiction. That could still be a paradoxical “ploy of history,” in which evil powers create good.
Rule of Power Politics
The contradiction lies rather in the act itself: By eliminating a bad ruler, they simultaneously seek to consolidate their own power. By killing the leadership, they seek to position themselves as the new masters. Good and evil—in the same act.
Therefore, it is by no means conceivable within moral terms, not by any cunning.
On the contrary: it is rather the dissolution of all moral categories. It is the rule of power politics. A naked, pure struggle for strength. Self-defense becomes tantamount to the expansion of one’s own position. The legitimate self-interest of one’s own survival, of one’s own existence, tips into a drive for power – in Israel’s case a regional power, in the USA’s case a global power.
Underestimated Resilience of the Iranian Regime
Such a thing does not raise questions of legitimacy. Neither legal nor moral. What matters is only the question of efficiency.
And while Trump posts: “We will completely destroy the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and in other ways,” the Iranian regime strikes back. Misjudgment! Trump’s gut feeling has underestimated the resilience of the Iranian regime, both militarily and politically.
At present there is a double dilemma: there is neither an exit scenario nor does it look like the regime will be destroyed, the “leaders of the earth” eradicated, as Trump trumpets. It rather looks like a “regime change” – but of a different kind than many Iranians hoped for: a move away from clerical rule toward a military system. A shift of power from the clergy to the Revolutionary Guards, the elite unit of the Iranian army. This would reveal the truth of the regime as such: a religiously veiled police state.
