The New York Times, the Democratic Party and the preparation of Phase 2 of the war against Iran

Posted by DryDeer775@reddit | EndlessWar | View on Reddit | 109 comments

The Times’ declaration that “Iran’s regime deserves no sympathy” must be examined in the full context of what this war has done to human beings. The war opened with the assassination of Ali Khamenei in a strike that killed him alongside family members in his residence, as well as senior military commanders and government officials, in a country engaged in active negotiations. The strikes simultaneously inflicted mass casualties on civilian populations, including, by credible accounts, more than 100 children. The wives and family members of targeted officials—people whose sole connection to the “regime” was the accident of familial relationship to those who held political power—were killed in the same strikes.

The Times editorial, surveying this reality, informs its readers that the regime deserves no sympathy. Had Iran launched a comparable preemptive strike on Washington—killing the president, his officials and family members during active negotiations, while simultaneously killing over 100 American children—the Times and the entire political establishment would have responded with a fury that would have made the reaction to September 11 appear measured. The demand for accountability would have admitted no qualification.

The Iranian dead receive none of this. The children among them are unacknowledged. The widows of assassinated officials generate no moral consideration. The “no sympathy” formulation erases them from the moral universe within which the editorial’s readers are invited to evaluate the war—a universe in which Iranian lives constitute a categorically different order of existence from American lives, one that imposes no obligations of acknowledgment or accountability on those who have taken them. This is not incidental to the editorial’s politics. It is their moral foundation, designed to ensure that Phase Two can be organized and prosecuted with the same indifference to Iranian human life that characterized Phase One.

The sentence that most precisely reveals this editorial’s political purpose is the following: “It is also a mistake for any Americans, including Mr. Trump’s critics, to root for this country to fail.”