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It has now been two and a half weeks since Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu started a war in Iran for a shifting and contradictory set of reasons, which seem to elude the president in any case. Other than murdering hundreds of Iranian civilians and bringing another Khamenei into power, Fintan O’Toole wonders in the Review’s March 13 issue, what is the point of this violence?
In Donald Trump’s war on Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.
And in the NYR Online this week, Amir Ahmadi Arian and Orly Noy write about those awful human consequences, and about watching powerlessly from afar—from the United States and Israel, respectively—as their homeland is devastated by cruel imperial whims.
Below, alongside O’Toole’s, Arian’s, and Noy’s essays, are other recent pieces on the war in Iran.
Fintan O’Toole
Signifying Absolutely Nothing
Trump’s war of choice in Iran is a performance of horrific military strength that betrays a stark political weakness.
Amir Ahmadi Arian
Of Fire and Rain
It was sometime in the afternoon, checking my phone for news from home, that I saw the flames.
Orly Noy
Longing for My Tehran
On the Israeli news, I watch as the country whose citizenship I hold devastates the one where I was born.
Pankaj Mishra
A Bitter Education
“Marco Rubio’s encomiums to white Western civilization, and Hegseth’s pornographic fantasies of ‘death and destruction from the sky all day long,’ proclaim today a sadistic urge to re-impose the racial hierarchies of the nineteenth century.”
Arang Keshavarzian
Iran Transformed
“With the war’s instigators trying to bend the Dey protests to their own purpose, it has become all the more urgent to understand the uprising’s causes and legacy.”
David Cole
The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War
“Ultimate responsibility for the Iran war lies with Trump, but the road to it was paved by his predecessors—of both parties.”
Joost Hiltermann
Fool’s Errands
“Having started a war unjustified by self-defense, and put US regional interests at risk in the process, Trump seems to have scored an own goal.”
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