How the US-Israel 'preemptive war' on Iran may have triggered something worse

In Monday’s Racket, I talked about the ways that Trump’s airstrikes on Iran almost certainly violated U.S. law and the Constitution. I promised to talk more about the ways it also likely violated international law, and why that may matter even more.

A lot has happened since: Trump declared a ceasefire, which Iran and Israel begrudgingly accepted (after getting in a few more blows each). A preliminary report leaked out of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said Iran’s nuclear weapons capability may have been set back only by a few months. Trump, who claimed Iran’s “key enrichment sites” were “completely and totally obliterated,” got royally pissed. This prompted his lackeys to hunt down the leaker while launching into performative The Boss Is Always Right mode.

The Israelis for their part say a potential Iranian nuclear weapons program had been set back by “years.” Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — who seems, despite much speculation, to not be dead — said in a video that Trump was forced to make “exaggerated” claims because the Americans “failed to achieve their intended goal.” The head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, weighed in today on French radio to say that there was “enormous damage” to three sites, but that “there are other nuclear sites in Iran that were not affected” and that calling the result “‘obliteration’ is too much.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) filed an article of impeachment against Trump for his abuse of war powers. That effort was quickly short-circuited with a vote by every Republican and 128 Democrats in the House. (Those Democrats voted against it either because they were fine with the bombing, out of a sense that presidents should rightfully be (literally) unimpeachable warlords, or because they will pass up any opportunity to fight. Though it is worth noting, as a matter of historical context at least, that successful efforts to topple past presidents have included similar charges.)

To figure out who’s right on all those fronts, a bigger question needs to be answered: What exactly was this war supposed to accomplish? Israel laid out its case in a letter to the U.N. Security Council on June 17:

The Israelis went on to explain that they had launched this preemptive war in response to “a critical development in Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” as well as the “imminent threat of additional Iranian missile and proxy attacks.” No further information or evidence was provided.

The ayatollah on the other hand said that was not the goal at all. Rather he claimed, “that the U.S. will only be satisfied with Iran’s surrender and nothing less” — a surrender which would presumably include toppling his regime. He’s got a decent case to make, considering that Trump declared on the sixth day of Israel’s attack that he was demanding Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” — a term evoking the bloody climaxes of the Civil War and World War II that made no sense in the context of supposedly limited strikes. Also, Israel provocatively called its mission in English “Operation Rising Lion,” which some Israelis took as a reference to the old pre-Islamic Republic flag of Iran — which features both a lion and a rising sun — and is flown by Iranian exiles who want to see a restoration of the old U.S. client monarchy of the Shah.¹ Indeed, the Jerusalem Post affirmed in the last days of the brief war that Israel was going “all in on regime change in Iran.”

Suffice it to say, that attacking first to overthrow an enemy government — even one you’re convinced is really, really nasty — is not considered a legitimate “preemptive strike” under international law.² But preemptive wars are dicey legal territory no matter how they are justified. The Empire of Japan claimed that both its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and attack on Pearl Harbor (as well on the Philippines, Guam, Singapore, etc.), in December 1941 were preemptive strikes against Chinese, American, and British aggression, respectively. The Nazis similarly defended their 1940 invasion of Norway at the Nuremberg Tribunal on the grounds that “Germany was compelled to attack Norway by the need to forestall an Allied invasion and [that] her action was therefore preemptive.”³  

Israel claims to this day that the 1967 war — a war it started by bombing the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian air forces on their runways and simultaneously invading the Gaza Strip — was preemptive, and thus a war of self-defense. People will forever argue over whether the Arab states were really planning to invade Israel, but the upshot was that the war changed the Middle East and the world: it was on the success of those preemptive strikes that Israel could invade and begin its occupations of Gaza and the West Bank, occupations that have continued in one form or another until today. And of course the most notorious example of “preventative war” in recent history was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which George W. Bush claimed was necessary to stop Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program (which did not exist).

All of those bad examples — and the lack of a particularly good one — don’t mean that the idea of a preemptive or preventive war is necessarily invalid. But it is a reminder that claims of being forced to start a war shouldn’t be taken at face value.

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