Historians may well mark June 13, 2025, as the day the world crossed a line it cannot easily step back from . In the predawn darkness of that day, war came once again to the Middle East with a terrifying fury. Israeli aircraft and missiles struck deep into Iran, lighting up the skies over Tehran and Tabriz with explosions. The operation—brazenly codenamed Rising Lion—hit about a hundred targets across at least a dozen provinces . These carefully planned attacks killed a slew of senior Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists within hours . For the first time since the 1980s, the people of Tehran awoke to the sound of air-raid sirens and the sight of smoke on the horizon from burning buildings. The strike on Iran’s capital was not a surgical “decapitation” as Israeli officials claimed, but a blow to the heart of a living city. Residential neighborhoods were among those bombed, and terrified civilians ran for cover as fire and debris rained down .
Tehran was left in shock and fury. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other officials denounced the assault, blaming Israel and the United States for a massive escalation and vowing that Iran would take “revenge” for this act of war . Impromptu demonstrations erupted across the country; what was supposed to be a day of religious celebration turned into a day of rage and mourning . The timing of the attack was conspicuously provocative: it came just two days before a scheduled round of nuclear negotiations between Iran and the U.S., talks that were abruptly cancelled as the first missiles fell . In one cruel stroke, the faint hopes of diplomacy were extinguished by the thunder of bombs.
For Iranians, there was no doubt that Washington’s hand was present in this assault. The United States has long served as Israel’s principal armorer and diplomatic shield, consistently using its UN Security Council veto to protect Israel from censure even when Israel breaches international law . In this case, U.S. involvement was as conspicuous as it was cynical. Reports quickly emerged that President Donald Trump’s administration had given a tacit green light for Israel’s strike and even supplied the bunker-busting bombs that were dropped on Iranian soil . (Trump himself, trying to straddle plausible deniability, acknowledged he knew the strikes were coming but insisted the U.S. provided no direct military aid .) Such duplicity—pretending to stand apart from an operation that one is actively enabling—did not fool anyone in Tehran. To Iranian eyes, the attack was clearly a joint U.S.-Israeli venture, another chapter in the “maximum pressure” campaign by which Washington asserts its dominion. The empire’s left hand claims peace while its right hand deals out death.
So why this war, and why now? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the onslaught as a last resort to stop Iran’s supposed dash toward a nuclear weapon . He insisted that Iran was only months away from acquiring the bomb, leaving Israel no choice but to act. But beyond Israel’s echo chamber, this pretext collapsed under scrutiny. Even the U.S. intelligence apparatus continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons and that no such bomb-making had been authorized by Iran’s leadership . As Israeli analyst Ori Goldberg noted, “There was no imminent threat to Israel. This was not inevitable. The [IAEA] report did not contain anything suggesting Iran posed an existential threat” . Every empire in history, however, has claimed its violence is unique and necessary. As Edward Said observed, “Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others… that it uses force only as a last resort.” Washington and Tel Aviv echoed this age-old refrain, portraying their offensive as a reluctant defensive measure to ‘bring order’ and ‘protect democracy’, even as the world watched the destruction and death wrought by this latest mission civilisatrice .
Beneath these official rationalizations runs a deeper logic of power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault once suggested inverting Clausewitz’s famous dictum by viewing politics itself as “the continuation of war by other means” . In other words, our political order is always already a battlefield, a “silent war” that permeates social institutions, economic inequalities, even our language and our bodies . What erupted in June 2025 was the culmination of a long, low-intensity war against Iran that had been underway in the halls of diplomacy and finance: years of sanctions strangling the Iranian economy, covert cyberattacks on its infrastructure, assassinations of its scientists, and the constant threat of “all options on the table.” This was the latent violence of imperial politics. Foucault’s point is that peace itself in such a system is an “order of battle” —an unstable equilibrium of forces maintained by coercion. The sudden explosion of open warfare merely made visible the brute force that had always buttressed the so-called peace. The war on Iran did not begin on June 13; it had been insinuating itself in every sanction vote, every military exercise, every bellicose speech long before the first bombs fell.
Power also operates through narratives—through the stories a civilization tells itself about who its enemies are. For decades, Iran has been cast in Western and Israeli discourse as the ultimate “Other,” irrational and dangerous. Netanyahu has described Iran as “the head of the octopus” controlling tentacled terror groups from Yemen to Lebanon , a vivid image that reduces a whole nation to a lurking monster. This is pure Orientalism, the old imperial habit of projecting onto the East every dark trait that the West fears in itself. As Edward Said famously noted, the “Orient” is often depicted as inherently barbaric and less human. “Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers… Always there lurks the assumption that… the Western consumer… is a true human being,” Said wrote . In this war, such caricatures have been unabashedly deployed. Iranians have been portrayed as mad mullahs or fanatics who cannot be reasoned with, a people who only understand the language of force. By defining the Iranian adversary as civilizationally inferior or even inhuman, the architects of war free themselves from moral restraint. Orientalism, in short, greased the skids to war: it helped make the unthinkable—raining destruction on a city of 15 million people—appear not only thinkable but righteous.
This dehumanization is not merely metaphorical—it has visceral psychological effects. Social psychologists have long observed that portraying an enemy as sub-human removes the ordinary ethical barriers to violence. We have seen this throughout history: Nazis depicting Jews as rats, Hutu extremists calling Tutsis “cockroaches,” and so on . Experiments by Albert Bandura and others showed that when people overhear someone being called “an animal,” they become more willing to administer harm to them . Indeed, if murder and torture are taboo, dehumanizing the “other” provides a mental loophole that justifies the unthinkable . It is disturbingly easy, as psychologist Adam Waytz put it, to “turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in their full humanity” . In the lead-up to this war, the constant drumbeat of anti-Iran rhetoric—from political speeches to Hollywood villains—functioned as a mass conditioning experiment in dehumanization. It normalized the idea that Iranian lives are less valuable. When we reduce a population to an abstract menace—when we speak of “eradicating the Iranian threat” rather than killing people—we numb the conscience and prime ordinary individuals to accept extraordinary cruelty.
The brutal paradox of war is that even as it devalues some lives, it hyper-values others. Judith Butler urges us to consider how “war… divides populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never counted as a life at all” . In this conflict, we see exactly that split. The lives of Iranian civilians have been rendered ungrievable in much of the Western media discourse. Their deaths are reported as statistics, if at all, their names and stories largely ignored. By contrast, had an Israeli family been killed by an Iranian missile, their faces and biographies would likely lead the evening news and evoke public outcry. This asymmetry is not accidental; it is how imperial power calibrates empathy. The invaders announce that they regret “collateral damage,” but implicitly they do not view the people in the collateral zone as fully human individuals whose loss is immeasurable. The concept of grievability exposes this moral distortion. Who gets to be a victim worthy of tears and who is brushed off as a necessary sacrifice? The answer reveals the hierarchy at the heart of this war. It is a hierarchy we must resolutely challenge, insisting that no life is expendable, that an Iranian child’s death is every bit as tragic as an Israeli child’s death.
And yet, through the fog of propaganda, the humanity of the “enemy” still shines through in unbearable ways. When an Iranian journalist in Tehran tweeted about her friend—“She was no military personnel, nuclear figure, or an official. She was just a girl who loved cycling and nature. She was my friend, her name was Najmeh” —she pierced the abstraction of war with a single irreducible human story. Najmeh was not a threat or a statistic; she was a beloved person, now gone forever. Such moments force us to confront what war really means, at the most elemental level: one precious, irreplaceable human being violently cut down. It is here that Butler’s philosophy of shared precariousness becomes concrete. “One’s life… is always in some sense in the hands of the other,” Butler writes, emphasizing our radical interdependency . We are all vulnerable, all exposed to the whims of those who wield power over us. The death of Najmeh is a devastating reminder that the victims of this war are not nameless “Iranians” or “Israelis” or “Americans” but daughters, sons, friends, lovers—each one the center of a unique life-world. An anti-militarist outlook begins from recognizing this fundamental truth: that the lives on the other side of the battle lines are as real and valuable as those on our side. If we truly absorbed that knowledge, wars like this would become almost impossible to wage.
Within Iran, the violence of the attack has also kindled fierce pride and resistance. There is an insight here that Frantz Fanon articulated during anti-colonial struggles: “At the individual level… violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence.” Fanon observed that oppressed peoples, subjected to systemic humiliation, often experience a kind of psychological reclamation of agency through the act of fighting back. Indeed, as news of the Israeli strikes spread, many Iranians, even those opposed to their government, seemed to rally around the flag, their sense of national dignity inflamed rather than cowed. The narrative of resistance—that Iran will not kneel, that it will absorb the blow and endure—has gained new potency. Yet Fanon’s theory comes with a tragic twist. While counter-violence may empower the colonized in spirit, it also exposes them to unimaginable suffering. War might awaken a colonized people’s self-confidence, but it does so by thrusting them into a crucible of death. As even Fanon would acknowledge, this “cleansing” is bought at a terrible price. The reality on the ground in Iran is that thousands may die, infrastructure will crumble, and trauma will scar a generation. The revolutionary fervor that violence ignites carries the seeds of further violence. It is a cycle as old as anti-colonial revolt: the bullet that shatters the oppressor’s image of invincibility also shatters homes and families of the oppressed. Little wonder, then, that observers caution war ‘only despoils and destroys’ and never truly liberates . The lesson is as somber as it is clear: the path of armed resistance, however understandable, is strewn with bitter losses.
From an anti-imperialist viewpoint, the Israel–Iran war of 2025 is not a sudden eruption but an outcome of long historical injustices. Iran’s collective memory is scarred by a litany of foreign interventions: the CIA-engineered coup of 1953 that toppled its democracy, the backing of the tyrannical Shah that followed, Western support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion and chemical attacks in the 1980s, and decades of economic warfare through sanctions. This context is essential to understanding Iranian attitudes. As Fanon would say, the colonial (or neo-colonial) “regime is a regime established by violence” and maintained by violence . Iranians have seen promises of reform and respect repeatedly betrayed by brute force. Every Iranian family has lived under the shadow of this continuous aggression in one form or another. Thus when Israel and the U.S. now strike Iran openly, it feels to Iranians like the mask has finally dropped. The velvet glove of diplomacy has slipped, revealing the iron fist that was always there. In their eyes, this war is the latest chapter of a long story of imperial domination—a story in which Iran is cast as a perpetual enemy not because of what it does, but because of what it is (an independent power in a region America and its allies seek to control). Understanding this narrative is crucial. It does not mean the Iranian state is angelic or that there are no internal issues; rather, it means that any genuine pursuit of peace must reckon with the real grievances and aspirations of a people that has endured what they perceive as a form of siege and humiliation for generations.
Wars of aggression also have a way of reflecting the internal pathologies of the aggressors. In Israel, Netanyahu’s decision to attack Iran cannot be separated from his domestic political crisis. For months before the war, Israel was wracked by protests against his increasingly authoritarian policies, and he was (and remains) entangled in corruption trials. As pressure mounted, he found salvation in conflict. Many in Israel openly accuse Netanyahu of leveraging war—both in Gaza and now in Iran—to cling to power . One Israeli analyst observed that for Netanyahu “the difference between foreign and domestic politics cannot be distinguished,” implying that he uses external conflict as a tool to manage internal dissent . Indeed, once the strikes on Iran commenced, opposition within Israel largely melted away; politicians across the spectrum rallied around the military venture . National unity born of war fever conveniently postponed the government’s day of accountability. This cynical pattern has echoes in U.S. history as well: leaders invoking external threats to consolidate authority at home. Meanwhile, far from the battlefield, another driver hums along: the profit motive. The military-industrial complex, against which President Eisenhower warned in 1961, thrives on perpetual conflict. The year 2023 saw the world’s top 100 arms companies reap an astounding $632 billion in revenue , boosted by ongoing wars in places like Ukraine and the Middle East. These corporations and their lobbyists exert enormous influence in Washington, ensuring that the answer to any international problem is too often “bombs away.” War has become a business—a self-perpetuating cycle where defense contractors, think-tank pundits, and campaign contributions all encourage a state of endless militarization. The diversion of resources is staggering: money that could build hospitals or schools instead builds missiles and drones. As one analysis noted, this war-driven economy exacts a double toll: it kills and maims abroad while draining social wealth at home, leaving urgent human needs—from pandemic preparedness to climate action—neglected . In America, this reality cuts across party lines; but it is the progressive left that most consistently sounds the alarm about it. We on the left insist that true security comes not from more weapons and wars, but from justice, cooperation, and addressing global crises that no missile can solve.
There is, in the war fever, an unsettling echo of ancient rituals. Anthropologists might say that modern warfare functions as a kind of sacrificial rite, one in which whole nations are offered up to appease the abstract gods of “security” and “national interest.” The rhetoric surrounding this war often reached for transcendent justifications—existential threat, survival, destiny—as if what was at stake was a cosmic battle between good and evil. This quasi-religious framing serves to sanctify the immense violence, turning it into a collective act of purification. Iran must be “cleansed” of its nuclear capabilities (a phrase not far from the language of inquisitions and holy wars). Civilian casualties become, in the cold jargon of military planners, “collateral damage,” a necessary sacrifice to the higher cause. Such logic should horrify us. It suggests that beneath the secular talk of strategy, there lies an atavistic impulse to find redemption through bloodshed. As a society, we engage in what Freud once termed a “collective superego” phenomenon: we allow our leaders to act out violent impulses that we would normally repress, and we call it patriotism. War, seen in this anthropological light, is a ritual of catharsis that expends human lives to renew a mythologized social order. But like all such rituals, it is fundamentally irrational and cruel. No lasting order or peace is born from the blood of sacrificial victims; that is a delusion that archaic cultures clung to, and that we must abandon if humanity is to survive.
The establishment voices—Republican neoconservatives, hawkish Democrats, much of the mainstream media—have closed ranks to cheerlead Israel’s “bold” action and America’s unquestionable allegiance. Dissenting voices have been marginalized, derided as naive peaceniks or appeasers. But we dissenters persist, even if on the fringes of the televised debate. I sit with comrades in anti-war coalitions, organizing emergency demonstrations in our cities, holding signs that say “No War on Iran” and “Not In My Name.” We recall the massive global protests of February 2003 when millions marched against the Iraq war, and though we are smaller now, our conscience compels us to speak out. We know that patriotism is not defined by supporting unjust wars; on the contrary, sometimes it is patriotic to oppose them, to demand that our nation live up to its ideals of liberty and justice for all rather than aligning with perpetual war.
The U.S.–Israeli strike on Iran feels like a horrific validation of our critiques of empire. It underscores how little has changed since the 20th-century coups and interventions we study and lament. The same ideologies of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny still seem to drive foreign policy: the notion that the U.S. and its allies have the right to remake or punish other societies in the name of an ill-defined “freedom.” As a Democrat, I also reflect on my own party’s complicity. It was a Democratic administration that, a decade ago, negotiated a promising peace deal with Iran (the JCPOA), and it was a Republican successor that tore it up. But it’s also true that too many centrist Democrats in Congress shrank from forcefully challenging Trump’s belligerence, and later, when back in power, the Democratic leadership failed to swiftly reverse course. Progressive wing—voices like those of Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—spoke out against the slide to war, but they were often isolated. Now the war is here, and the moral cost is immeasurable.We have to strengthen the anti-war movement, to link it with movements for climate justice and racial justice, because it’s all one fight at the end of the day—the fight for a world where resources are used to uplift life, not deal death. Our struggle is admittedly uphill, but moments like this remind us exactly why we must continue. The sight of children in Tehran bleeding from shrapnel wounds, of families huddled in basements, of refugees fleeing their homes—these are intolerable in any world that calls itself civilized. If we truly value human rights, we must oppose the forces.
For all the talk of rational strategy and calculated strikes, war is inherently unpredictable. Once unleashed, its logic often escapes the control of its instigators. Already the ripple effects of this conflict are spreading beyond Iran and Israel. Observers warn that Iran’s retaliation may not stop at Israeli targets; it could reach American bases across the Middle East, engulfing U.S. forces and regional proxies in a widening conflagration . The Strait of Hormuz—artery of the world’s oil supply—now lies under the shadow of potential closure or sabotage, threatening a global economic crisis if the war drags on . And perhaps most perilously, Israel’s campaign, intended to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, may have utterly backfired. Humiliated and enraged, Tehran is openly weighing withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and even the revocation of its long-held fatwa against nuclear weapons . Should Iran decide that only a nuclear deterrent can safeguard it from future aggression, it might sprint toward the bomb in earnest—thus fulfilling the very prophecy that Netanyahu claimed he was forestalling. In a bitter irony, the bombardment of Iran may end up accelerating the nuclearization of the region, not preventing it .
In the end, this war asks a fundamental question: What kind of species do we want to be? Here we have all the knowledge and philosophical insight of our times at our disposal—centuries of reflections on power, violence, ethics—and yet we find ourselves repeating the darkest chapters of history. We see once again the truth that violence, even when draped in the finery of high principle, degrades both victim and perpetrator. We see how easily noble words can be mustered to justify ignoble acts. There is a line from Edward Said about the “chorus of willing intellectuals” who sing the praises of benevolent empire ; it rings in my ears as I read pundits rationalizing the bombardment of Tehran as a necessary policing of the disorderly Orient. But against that chorus, other voices persist—voices of critical intellect, of empathy, of remembrance. They remind us, as Foucault did, that war is not a momentary eruption but a reflection of how we have structured our world all along . They remind us, as Fanon did, that those who face oppression will not stay passive forever . They remind us, as Butler does, that our moral imagination must expand to encompass all lives, especially those our governments would render invisible . And they remind us, as Said taught, that the way we imagine “Others” is a crucial part of either perpetuating conflict or finding peace.
This speculative chronicle of a June 2025 war is dense and difficult, intentionally so, because it should not be easy to make sense of something so senseless. Yet, to resist it, we must try. We must pick apart the threads of imperialism, militarism, racism, and fear that have woven this shroud. We must insist on seeing clearly through the smoke of war—seeing the power games for what they are, and seeing the human beings who suffer behind the statistics. Perhaps then, we can imagine alternatives: a Middle East free of nuclear threats not because of preemptive strikes, but because of genuine regional disarmament agreements; an Israel secure not by dominance over its neighbors, but by a just peace with them; an America respected not for its aircraft carriers, but for its commitment to equality and cooperation. These are not easy visions to realize, but the alternative is to remain locked in the nightmare that unfolded in June 2025, doomed to replay its tragedies.
In the final analysis, the war between Israel and Iran stands as a stark indictment of our failure to heed the lessons of history and the calls of conscience. It is a war that should never have happened. In it we see the cost of allowing the abstractions of power and ideology to outweigh the concrete value of human life. Let this then be a moment of reckoning. Let those of us who yearn for a more peaceful and just world take from this horror a renewed determination to challenge the forces that brought it about. And let us, above all, remember Najmeh’s name, and all the names we will never know, and refuse to let them be forgotten amid the triumphalism of the victors. Their silenced voices cry out for a future where no more lives are sacrificed at the altar of war.