Here We Go Again: A War That Makes Me Ashamed to Be an American

The lack of plans, rationale, or end goals. The lies. And perhaps most of all, that girls’ school. This war is another blot on our country.

We’re 13 days into the U.S.-Israel war against Iran—and it seems as ill-conceived and wrong as when it started. Oil prices keep going up. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba has taken control of the Iranian government, despite delusional American hopes that the governing regime there would quickly collapse. President Trump and his aides can’t get their stories straight on why the United States started this war and what its end game is. American officials are privately conceding that U.S. military personnel bombed a girls’ school, but Trump is still playing dumb. Congressional Democrats are unsurprisingly furious, but the most notable criticism this week came from Trump 2024 supporter Joe Rogan, who declared himself “betrayed” by a president who in the podcaster’s view had promised not to get into “stupid wars.”

It’s entirely possible that in a few weeks, the war is over, the U.S. has killed Mojtaba Khamenei and installed a more American-friendly leader, oil prices are down, and Rogan is back on the Trump Train. But even if scenarios most favorable to Trump play out, Americans should be infuriated and embarrassed that our country is waging this war. This is the second-worst war launched by the U.S. in the last few decades, in my view only eclipsed by the Iraq War that started in 2003.

There are three reasons this military action stands out as worse than nearly all others. First and most importantly, there is no clear reason for the U.S. to be attacking Iran right now. There was no chance Iran would launch a nuclear attack on the United States. There was little immediate indication of an imminent nuclear attack on Israel, an ally of the U.S. that we have long defended. It’s true that the Iranian regime has denied democratic rights to its citizens, killed those who protested, constantly attacked Israel’s military either directly or through proxies like Hezbollah, and at times tried to........

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