I thrilled to that haunting, mechanical roar. As a boy, I had been promised a future of technological marvels; here was their fulfillment. I thrilled also to images of missile stockpiles exploding and of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters vanishing in plumes of bilious smoke. I was happy to hear of Ayatollah Khamenei’s demise; and I enjoyed seeing the faces of  mullahs and Iranian military commanders crossed out by red Xs in US and Israeli online propaganda. 

There isn’t a little boy on the planet who doesn’t light up at the idea of killing the bad guys. Nor is there a man in whom something of that little boy — and his moral clarity — doesn’t live on. 

A vocal, politically diverse cohort of Americans, however, have betrayed that healthy impulse. When the ayatollah was killed, The New York Times wistfully played down his reign of terror, while the “globalize the intifada” crowd held vigils to mourn him. Rather than express relief at the regime’s decapitation, most elected Democrats have framed the joint Israeli-US campaign as an illegal, unprovoked act of aggression. Legacy media understated our successes and catastrophized missteps. The Economist, in an article headlined “Advantage Iran,” declares that “a month of bombing has achieved nothing.” Across social media, partisans of what Josh Hammer calls the “Retard Right” — dabblers in low-IQ anti-Semitic conspiracism, such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes — reinforce this narrative. They boost pro-Iran propaganda that wildly overstates the success of Iranian missile attacks on American bases and Israeli cities, while minimizing the extent of the damage the campaign has wrought on Iran’s military.

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The terror of the aged woman

By Justin Lee

The prevailing tone has not been measured, morally serious criticism of our objectives (or lack thereof) or the means chosen to achieve them, but of glee at the prospect of Trump’s — and thus America’s — failure. For Democrats, that glee anticipates a bloodbath for the GOP in the November midterms, and a third round of impeachment theater in 2027. The Retard Right is eager to see the same thing, for a different reason: they want to punish Trump for being, in their fevered telling, Benjamin Netanyahu’s servant.

This trash discourse is stealing oxygen from the conversations that matter. 

I write this as a pacifist and a Christian, who has reluctantly come to adopt the theory of the just war — in a world sometimes so fallen that all of our options are tainted with evil, we must pursue what good we can, knowing that we will ask God’s forgiveness later. In such a situation, intransigent pacifism devolves into sentimental moralism. I believe this is where we find ourselves with Iran; as a consequence, my pacifism must yield to the calculus of just-war theory.

We’ve known for some time that Iran, if it so chooses, could in a few weeks enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for up to 16 compact nuclear warheads. But the stakes have been much higher than the publicly known. Last week, when the IRGC launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that houses a joint US-UK military base, the world learned that Iran is capable of striking London. And setting aside the specter of nuclear weapons, as a modern, industrialized country, Iran also possesses enough cesium-137 and cobalt-60 to make any number of dirty bombs, which could be packaged into missiles capable of striking most European capitals. As an erratic regime sworn to destroy the West, this makes it an imminent threat to NATO.

To pass just-war muster, among other criteria, a war must be pursued as a last resort. But as the theologian Oliver O’Donovan explains in The Just War Revisited, “the ‘last’ resort is bounded by the last practicable moment for effective action.” On Feb. 24, Reuters reported that Tehran was in the process of acquiring supersonic anti-ship missiles from China. Had it done so before Israel and the United States attacked, the cost of engagement would have soared astronomically. Although the Trump administration has done a poor job communicating this to the American people, it does appear that we chose to strike just as the window for effective action was set to close. 

Thus far, our actions have been very effective. The war with Iran has been more one-sided than perhaps any large-scale conflict in history, with America and Israel inflicting losses on the enemy in wild disproportion to what we’ve suffered ourselves. Khamenei and more than 40 of Iran’s top-ranking officials have been killed in air strikes, as have most of the Assembly of Experts tasked with selecting his successor. By destroying Iran’s navy and neutralizing up to 90% of its ballistic capabilities, Washington has already ended Tehran’s ability to project power in the Middle East, and we’re on track to scuttle what remains of the country’s nuclear ambitions. 

What’s more, China and Russia had outfitted Iran with their most advanced defense technology, hoping that their Iranian proxy would keep Uncle Sam indefinitely bogged down in the Middle East, and thus ill-equipped to fight on other fronts. But this technology has proved utterly useless against the US military, both in Iran and Venezuela, signaling to Beijing that its ambitions in the South China Sea could be much costlier than anticipated.

These are substantive gains, and perhaps the Trump administration — notwithstanding its inconsistent messaging — will judge them sufficient. But a more decisive victory involving regime change (or at least regime moderation) is conceivable. Were that to occur, America would have direct influence over one-seventh of China’s oil imports and the ability to impede its Belt and Road Initiative, giving us plenty of leverage to dissuade it from invading Taiwan. 

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Iranian strategist: no ceasefire on our agenda

By Sohrab Ahmari

It is conceivable — yet the public discourse fails to conceive of it. We fail to celebrate our military victories; we show no pride for our military capacities; and we barely honor the fighting spirit of the men and women who serve. When the war began, the Twelver Shia death cult that controls Iran had just murdered thousands of its own citizens for protesting the regime’s abuses — yet many among us identify America as the bad guy. 

My feelings are the opposite: while I mourn the loss of innocent lives and remain wary of the war becoming protracted — especially as President Trump weighs the possibility of sending in ground troops to secure Iran’s uranium — I am also optimistic. After nearly five decades of indulging the Iranian regime’s mayhem, we have dealt it a measure of justice, and thwarted its apocalyptic aspirations. And the geopolitical scales are rebalancing in a way that may yet produce justice on an even grander scale.

A nation’s character is judged by whether it is willing to sacrifice for what it deems to be a greater good, and whether it can take pride in its own strength and do the work necessary to maintain it. There is nothing virtuous about a weak man who chooses not to fight. His choice hardly counts as one. But a strong man trained in combat who chooses peace has exercised judgment of real moral weight. These are the qualities that I hope we rediscover, and learn to nurture in the coming months. While it may be hard to see today, amid the hysteria of its opponents, Trump’s Iran war may just bring about such a transformation.

The news came as no surprise. Francis has long maintained that the death penalty is “contrary to the Gospel.” Last October, to an audience of cardinals and ambassadors marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Catechism, he said “however grave the crime that may be committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it attacks the inviolability and the dignity of the person.”

So far, the announcement has garnered little reaction, though is generally seen as welcome. Those for whom the announcement is not welcome – the governments of the fifty plus countries that retain the death penalty – have largely remained silent. After all, the Pope’s pronouncement does not have the force of international law, and, as Stalin once pointed out, the Pope has no “divisions”.

But is their silence entirely cynical? The much respected Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, Vice President of the US Conference of Bishops, in welcoming the change added that “many good people will continue to believe that our society needs the death penalty to express its moral outrage and to punish those who commit the ultimate crime of taking human life.”

Those same people would probably already have been at odds with Pope John Paul’s revision of the Catechism in 1992, which stated that the cases in which the death penalty was absolutely necessary in order to protect society were “practically non-existent.” As the then Cardinal Ratzinger (subsequently Pope Benedict XVI) pointed out, disagreement did not place them seriously at odds with Christian teaching. That, however, was ultimately because the Catechism permitted the theoretical possibility of the death penalty being necessary, and therefore a matter for the civil power, whose duty it was to protect society.

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Free Minds: Robert Sarah, the dissenting cardinal, seeking to save his Church

By Allan Mallinson

That theoretical room for manoeuvre has been removed with Pope Francis’ revision – and it has huge implications. For a start, it appears to put the Vatican on a collision course with those countries who retain the death penalty, not least the United States, but also China, where Pope Francis has been making a major – and controversial – effort towards rapprochement.

Catholics in China are divided between those in the ‘underground’ community who recognise the Pope, and those who belong to the state-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA), whose bishops are appointed by the government. The change in the Catechism puts the underground bishops at direct odds with Beijing, and compliant CPA bishops at odds with the Vatican.

Is Pope Francis saying therefore that previous doctrine was wrong? No: he is saying that the change is a “development of doctrine”, taking account of new possibilities and understanding.

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The 1992 Catechism was at pains to emphasise that the “Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime… The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude… recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.”

In 1992 the Magisterium, “the Church’s divinely appointed authority to teach the truths of religion” (vested uniquely in the Pope and the bishops), believed that at that time there were still states which might not have the means “to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive [by death] the one who has committed it”. Now it believes that there are no such states.

But there remains the possibility that the threat, character and purpose of crime may change, in which case, in logic, a further development of doctrine may restore the admissibility of the death penalty – or even permit it under existing provisions. It is significant, for example, that Pope Francis has proposed no change to doctrine regarding war – or, as the Catechism has it, “Safeguarding Peace.”

All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war, but “as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence, once all peace efforts have failed.” In this case, the civil authorities “have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary for national defence.” The Catechism is not specific as to what these obligations are, or the penalties that are admissible in order to enforce them. But the death penalty is not specifically excluded, nor indeed is it made inadmissible for war crimes.

What, therefore, if “crime” is used by an aggressor to wage war against a nation in what is known increasingly as ‘hybrid warfare’: a blend of political, cyber and conventional warfare, plus other influencing methods, such as fake news, diplomacy and electoral intervention? What if the aggressor is not another state, but a subversive movement within the state, either a political force or an essentially criminal one such as a major drugs cartel using paramilitary tactics to establish a ‘narco-state’?

One of the Catechism’s requirements for recourse to war to be legitimate (“Just War” theory) is that the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation “must be lasting, grave, and certain”. Immediately after the announcement, President Duterte of the Philippines, around 80% of whose population is Catholic, and which suspended the death penalty in 2006, said that it was “still the priority of the administration to re-impose the death penalty for serious drug-related offences.”

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Will this place him seriously at odds with Christian teaching, with the country’s bishops and 80% of Filipinos? Not necessarily. Duterte speaks of the country’s “war on drugs”, believing the threat to be lasting, grave, and certain. He might rightly point to the Catechism’s assertion that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence”, all peace efforts having failed, which only the government has the capacity to decide.

Pope Francis’s development of doctrine has the potential to sow considerable dissension within the Catholic Church if it is applied without discernment. The Catechism asserts “the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict”; the fact of war having broken out “does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.” But we cannot know the future character of conflict, and we cannot therefore know the consequences of inaction – such as staying the use of the death penalty.

Pope Francis is a Jesuit; he is well-versed in subtlety of thinking. I believe, we can expect further “development of doctrine.”