Trump and Hegseth are killing Iranian civilians and calling it retaliation.
Last night’s heavy strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets inside Iran killed three members of a family on Qeshm island — a father, a mother, and their two-year-old child. The child was two years old. U.S. Central Command described the operation as “a powerful response to yesterday’s attempted Iranian attacks.” The actual consequence was a dead child whose name the Pentagon will never say.
Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. What political object is being continued here? The administration cannot name one. “We’re going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn to hit them,” the President told reporters. “They asked us not to do it.” Asked whether he would always retaliate, he said: “Pretty much.” Not strategy. Not deterrence. Not the protection of American interests. Revenge-as-policy, dressed in the vocabulary of military necessity. That is not a war aim. That is a mood. Wars run on moods kill the men and women the moods send into them.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but I sat in an Abrams crew seat in 2003, and I have read enough Clausewitz to know what a war looks like when it is being run as one. This is not what one looks like.
The Iran strike is the latest move in a six-month campaign that has produced more than 600 U.S. service members injured, an Iraqi sovereignty violation after joint U.S.-Saudi strikes killed at least 20 Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces members — which the Iraqi presidency condemned as “an unacceptable attack and a blatant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty” — and a drone attack on an Egyptian port on Wednesday, the first direct strike on Egyptian territory since the war began. The war has crossed borders and oceans and is now reaching into countries that were bystanders a week ago. Secretary Hegseth sat down this week with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to review three framing options: diplomacy, intensified economic pressure, or renewed military action. That is not a strategy. That is a menu of framings the Pentagon can swap depending on which one plays best on cable. The strategic goal is not stated because the strategic goal is operating tempo — the machine runs because the machine runs.
This is what a strategy vacuum looks like when filled with the capacity to inflict violence. The United States has spent six months and hundreds of casualties generating the very thing the military was supposed to prevent: a widening Middle Eastern war with no exit.
The IRGC shares culpability, and I do not equivocate on that. Tuesday’s attempted ballistic missile attack on American forces in Jordan was an act of war. The official Iranian statement called it a response to “the acts of aggression of the American child-killing army” — a line Tehran knows will land because it knows what will come next. Iran’s IRGC also struck three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz after the vessels “ignored warnings.” But the fact that Iran committed an act of war does not establish that the American response was proportionate to its stated military objective, nor does it make a dead child on Qeshm island a necessary cost of self-defense. The proportionality math does not work in any direction that ends with a dead toddler.
Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, set out the principle of discrimination: military force must be directed at combatants and military objectives, not at civilians. The doctrine of double effect permits civilian casualties only as an unintended side effect of a proportionate attack on a legitimate military target. Even taking the U.S. account at face value — that the strike hit IRGC command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance, maritime capabilities — the question becomes proportionality: was the expected military advantage of a specific strike on a residential street of Qeshm island worth the foreseeable risk? A resident described the electricity cutting out repeatedly and explosions since 3:40 in the morning: “We are helpless.” On a target list that ran dozens of sites across a country, the calculus is unlikely to satisfy the standard Walzer’s framework requires. CENTCOM did not explain why a residential home in Chah Tangu was on the same target list as military command centers, or whether the expected military advantage of that particular strike outweighed the certainty of residential exposure.
Sun Tzu wrote that the highest form of warfare is to win without fighting, and the next best is to break the enemy’s strategy. The current campaign is pursuing neither. It is pursuing the operating tempo of a military-industrial complex that needs kinetic action to justify its budget and a presidential ego that needs to be seen hitting back. The strategy is the rhythm. The rhythm is the strategy.
The pattern is the one the country has watched for twenty-three three years. A strike on a Target of Opportunity produces a “powerful response.” The “powerful response” produces another strike. The next strike produces the next “powerful response.” The body count on both sides climbs, and the strategic vocabulary stays the same because the strategic vocabulary is the only thing keeping the American public from asking what the strategy actually is.
A U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that the Wednesday assault was “larger in scope than recent U.S. operations but did not amount to a return to major combat.” That sentence is doing a lot of work. A war against a country of 90 million people, conducted by long-range aircraft, that has killed at least three civilians in their home, that the host country’s military is striking from a foreign air base — that is combat. Calling it anything else is administration work product, not strategic description.
Six hundred American troops have been wounded in this war. The families of those men and women are living the cost of a conflict whose objectives the administration has never presented to the public whose children are doing the fighting. The 600 service members injured in six months of operations are not a press release line. They are the men and women the administration sent into this conflict — the Abrams crews, the maintenance troops, the intelligence personnel, the logistics soldiers. They are the readers of this column, or they are the husbands and wives and parents of the readers. The Veterans Crisis Line is 988, then Press 1. If you are a service member or a veteran reading this and the weight of what you have carried feels too heavy, that line is open.
The men who ordered last night’s strikes will not be the ones who spend the next decade at VA appointments. The men who profited from the weapons contracts will not be the ones whose marriages dissolve under the weight of traumatic brain injury and moral injury.
Andrew Bacevich has written extensively on what he calls the Washington Rules: the bipartisan consensus that the United States must maintain global military preeminence, must lead, must be present, must intervene. Those rules do not tell you when to stop. They do not tell you what the political object is. They tell you only that the capacity for violence must be exercised because the capacity exists.
The original sin of the post-2001 wars was allowing the executive branch to define for itself what constitutes armed conflict against a country, and then to describe its operations in language designed to evade the legal frameworks that govern armed conflict. The 2001 AUMF — sixty words, signed September 18, 2001 — was stretched to cover operations against Iran, against Iraqi militias, against the Houthis, against groups that did not exist on September 18, 2001. The current campaign is the inheritor of that architecture. The architects are still in the Pentagon. The architecture is still in place. The dead are still dead.
The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, does not need to conspire to perpetuate war. It only needs the operating tempo to continue. Lockheed Martin’s F-35 needs flight hours to justify its sustainment costs. RTX’s Patriot interceptors need to be fired and replenished. General Dynamics’ surface combatants need deployments. Northrop Grumman’s strike platforms need missions. The pilots and the maintainers need the work. The civilians on Qeshm island are the byproduct of a tempo that has to be sustained because the system that sustains it has to be sustained. Eisenhower called it “unwarranted influence, whether sought or un sought.” Sixty-five years later, the influence is a budget cycle.
The President called negotiations “very friendly”; then the bombs fell. Iran denied talks were even happening. The Saudis reportedly want to de-escalate. The Israelis reviewed three strategies — diplomacy, economic pressure, renewed military action — in a meeting with the Defense Secretary. The child on Qeshm island is not part of any of those conversations.
The administration has a choice. It can pursue the diplomatic track the Saudis are reportedly asking for. It can pursue the economic pressure track the administration claims to favor. Or it can continue the military track, which has produced six months of operation, no stated end state, 600 U.S. troops injured, three Iranian civilians killed on a residential island, an Iraqi sovereignty violation, and a first-ever direct strike on Egyptian territory. The administration is choosing the military track. The administration is choosing it every week. The administration is choosing it on Wednesday.
I do not know the name of the two-year-old child on Qeshm island. But I know what that child cost the United States in this war. The answer is nothing measurable. The child was not a combatant, not a target, not a military objective. The child was collateral damage — the coldest phrase in the English language, invented precisely so we could keep doing this without stopping to name what we have done.
The dead on Qeshm island do not have a Pentagon press officer. The PMF fighters killed in Iraq do not have a Wall Street Journal source. The Egyptian port worker whose facility was struck does not have a White House comment.
This is the ledger: six hundred wounded, six months, no exit, one child.
That is what “hitting back” costs when the people making the decisions have never had to count the bodies.