Above photo: America Killed 165 Minab Students protest in front of the U.N. office in Tehran, March 17, 2026. Avash Media/Wikimedia Commons.
The United States – the cynosure of Western society — has committed moral suicide in Gaza.
And the death certificate was issued in Iran.
Collective suicide always is an ugly business to observe — especially when it’s your own country debasing itself. Yet, we seem unfazed. Indeed, we redouble our acts of inhumanity as if reiteration somehow normalizes the perversity of what we have done.
The systematic insulation of ourselves from the magnitude of our turpitude is all the more remarkable for its requiring the constant filtering of graphic images of odious criminality to which we are accomplices. There may be some faint recognition, subliminally, of our culpability in the diligence with which dissenters and truth-tellers are suppressed and punished.
That repression, an insult to our supposedly hallowed civic principles, is the most immediate price Western societies are paying for this depravity. Other baneful consequences will register down the road. For the disconcerting truth is that the majority of the world sees our sins for what they are, and scorns our gross hypocrisy.
This historic self-mutilation is unique — in two respects. First, It was not provoked by great trauma, humiliation or defeat in some high stakes gamble. Second, the act was not in one neat stroke; rather, the deed was accomplished through a succession of deliberate decisions by three American presidents: Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The first provided the precursor in Yemen where the United States was an accomplice in the Saudi-led slaughter of Houthis — a gratuitous collaboration where the sole American justification was a desire to curry favor with the mercurial MBS.
Ethics and Foreign Policy
Morality and international politics do not mix easily. For good reason. War is the distinguishing trait of relations among states. And war is all about killing and maiming other human beings. Of course, war is episodic rather than continuous. But the ubiquity of conflict situations remains the hallmark of inter-state relations. Violence is omnipresent — in mind if not in act.
Yet, we are creatures who have an innate ethical sense — genetic rather than conceptual, albeit we also have the innate capacity to harm others. First, it derives from our awareness that survival as a species in competition with other species conveys a basic solidarity even as we contest with other humans — at times violently. Second, every organized society develops a code of conduct that proscribes a range of disruptive actions: violent attacks foremost among them.
In effect, they extend the instincts/logic of family or tribal identity to an abstract grouping — covering a considerable genetic range. Social morality in concept and doctrine derives from those elementary facts of collective life.
At the international level, there is no equivalent authoritative government, organized society or — above all — communal sentiment. Hence, the logic of realpolitik predominates. It is structurally determined whatever the proximate reasons for any particular war might be. Still, war as much as peace at any given time is a function of circumstances.
War is a social phenomenon — not the expression of humans’ innate penchant for violent combat. The international disorder is not tantamount to a state of anarchy; violent encounters do not occur in the manner of collisions among billiard balls after the break.
So, how does morality/ethics enter into the picture?
The moral standard applicable to political affairs is different from that applicable to individual behavior. The latter entails ultimate ends and abstract norms. The former gives place only to an “ethic of responsibility” — as Max Weber explained.
No Ten Commandments or their counterpart in other religious traditions exists as an appropriate benchmark for appraising good or bad conduct — certainly not of the collectivities (states) which are the protagonists.
Violent actions taken against other societies usually are felt as requiring a justification. Not always, of course. At the extreme, there were the Huns, the Mongols, Timur, the Nazis who launched wars and committed atrocities because they felt like it or for self-glorification.
For others, conquest was its own justification. Implicit in imperial expansion has stemmed from the notion that superiority itself endows conquest with rightness. For still others, the flame of ideology — religious zealotry, ethnic/tribal passionate nationalism — incites organized violence aimed at propagation of the TRUTH or to fulfill DESTINY.
The more autocratic the ruler, the less accountable he or she is, the less need there is for justification. Therefore, the spread of literacy and the heightening of awareness among the mass (or some substantial segment of it) makes legitimation increasingly important. Popular democracy made it an imperative.
That need has proven less of a hindrance to war-making than Immanuel Kant, among others, presumed. However, justification of war does, as a consequence, draw upon some moral imagery. Where necessity is less than self-evident, i.e. where defense of the native territory is not at issue, warring needs to be legitimated as “right.”
A closely related, even more acute requirement, is to pursue war in a manner that conforms to a society’s generalized ethical standards. That has several aspects.
There should be a persuasive explanation of why the country has to go to war — that is one. Non-violent means of resolving the underlying conflicts should be pursued until proven futile — that is two. The minimum requisite force should be used – that is three. Enemy troops should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and norms of the society — that is four. Non-combatants (civilians) should be spared the dangers of combat whenever reasonably possible. That is five.
Here is where the question of war and morality gets interesting. For most of history, wars were fought between armies composed of warrior castes, “professionals” and volunteers. They were limited in space and time. Battles were intermittent.
Civilians suffered mainly from two causes: the disruption of normal civil life and plunder. That changed with the advent of total war wherein the resources of entire societies (human and economic) were mobilized to fight prolonged wars. The inner logic of that circumstance made production sites and whole cities targets.
Airplanes created the means to attack them on a massive scale. Thus: Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo and ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was not any appreciable moral outrage about the resulting indiscriminate murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Total war itself implied the highest stakes; therefore, everything goes.
The experience of World War II did not bury the idea that there were “civilized” standards of war which should be observed. The United States and other Western countries, in particular, continued to enunciate principles that forbade the committing of atrocities against individual civilians or defenseless prisoners.
That code presumes that an identifiable soldier is in a position to decide whether or not to harm a vulnerable individual on the other side. In modern war, however, the “other side” most often is not visible and the individual on our side does not have much discretion over how to act.
Where those conditions do not obtain, ethical rules can still be applied: e.g. in the wake of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam — however belatedly. Admittedly, many atrocities are not acknowledged or they are covered-up. (By the way, the officer who composed the first draft of the initial My Lai whitewash for the U.S. Army was then Major Colin Powell — he of “aluminum tubes” infamy).
