The Word “War” Is Doing Too Much Work

What matters most in the present confrontation with Iran is not the old question of whether this is “war” in the classical sense. That question is already too flattering. The more revealing issue is that the word war still gives violence an undeserved dignity, as if naming it in grand historical language were enough to make it coherent, strategic, or lawful. Under the law of armed conflict, interstate armed force can amount to an international armed conflict even without any formal declaration of war. But that clarification saves nothing. It only sharpens the embarrassment. The issue is not vocabulary. The issue is whether force is being used without a credible strategic end and then wrapped in language designed to conceal that emptiness. 

Law as Selective Legitimization

I do not begin from sentimental loyalty to “international law” as such. Too often it functions less as a universal restraint than as a selective grammar of legitimacy: invoked by the strong when useful, blurred when inconvenient, moralized after the fact. In that sense, the appeal to law frequently serves asymmetry more than justice. The point, then, is not to mourn the violation of a supposedly neutral order. The point is to see how quickly legal language becomes a laundering device for power, and how eagerly public rhetoric uses the word war to convert operational decisions into historical necessity. AP’s own explanation for adopting the term “war” in this case only proves the point: it may work as newsroom shorthand, but it settles none of the harder questions. 

The Real Scandal Is Strategic

The deeper scandal is strategic, not juridical. Perhaps the most revealing feature of this confrontation is the near-total disappearance of a recognizable end. Not victory. Not settlement. Not even a coherent doctrine of regime change. Reuters reported on March 5 that Pete Hegseth insisted the United States was not expanding its military objectives even while describing a campaign broad enough to degrade Iran’s missile capabilities, infrastructure, and naval assets. That is not strategic clarity. It is managed continuation: a cycle of strikes, calibrated retaliation, symbolic overreach, and permanent threshold-testing. Violence without a goal is often more dangerous than violence with one, because it no longer needs success in order to continue. It only needs repetition. 

The Fantasy of Internal Collapse Failed

What failed here was not only a legal narrative. A political fantasy failed as well. The fantasy was that force would trigger internal collapse. Kill enough leaders, hit enough infrastructure, generate enough fear, and society will do the rest. But the available reporting points in the opposite direction. Reuters has reported skepticism among U.S. officials about whether regime change can actually be produced this way, even after the killing of top Iranian leadership figures. The pattern is familiar: external assault does not necessarily dissolve a political order; it may instead consolidate what it was supposed to shatter. That is one of the oldest failures of coercive strategy, and one of the most stubborn. 

A Real-Estate Mind in Geopolitics

There is another revealing detail here: what happens when the president is, at bottom, a man of real estate. Territory ceases to appear as a lived historical field and starts to appear as a parcel, a corridor, a leverage point. In that vision, the Kurds are not a people with a long genealogy of betrayal, deferred sovereignty, and instrumental alliances. They are a flank asset. A tactical hinge. Reuters-reported sourcing on U.S. discussions with Kurdish actors about a potential Iran operation points exactly in that direction: not emancipation, but utility; not a durable political future, but subcontracted risk. They are not promised history. They are assigned a role. And the role ends the moment it ceases to be useful. 

Civilian Death as Strategic Exposure

Civilian casualties matter here not because they restore moral innocence to anyone, but because they expose the bankruptcy of a strategic language that continues to invoke necessity after losing any credible account of purpose. Once civilian death is absorbed into the administrative grammar of force, the familiar formulas of precision, proportionality, and collateral damage no longer clarify anything. They function only as after-the-fact maintenance for a violence that has outlived strategy and now survives through repetition, narrative control, and the managed suspension of moral consequence.

“No Apologies” as Doctrine

Then comes the coldest formula of all: no apologies. Reuters quoted Hegseth saying the campaign was being carried out “surgically, overwhelmingly and unapologetically.” That matters because it is more than rhetoric. It is doctrine in miniature. Once power announces in advance that it will not apologize, it is no longer merely defending an operation. It is withdrawing violence from the moral grammar of debt before the accounting even begins. First comes the strike. Then comes the narrative. Then comes the refusal of regret. In that sequence, impunity is not the end state. It is the opening assumption. 

Restraint as Decorative Furniture

The constitutional dimension in the United States only deepens the ugliness. Reuters reported on March 5 that the House rejected a war powers resolution that would have constrained Trump’s ability to continue military action against Iran, while the 1973 framework still nominally limits unauthorized hostilities to 60 days unless Congress approves them. The machinery of restraint remains formally present, but politically it is beginning to look like ceremonial furniture: visible, intact, and increasingly irrelevant. That is how legal language dies in practice—not in one dramatic abolition, but through the smooth transition from limit to décor. 

The same structural pattern is visible in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The public word war may be understandable, even necessary, but it still explains too little. It organizes emotion while concealing thresholds. It does not answer the decisive questions of aggression, proportionality, self-defense, or responsibility for civilian death. The broader problem, then, is not merely that war has returned. It is that contemporary violence increasingly operates through the erosion of the very language that once claimed to classify and limit it. What disappears first is not force. What disappears first is the meaningful distinction between justification, narration, and brute permission. 

So the most honest thesis is a brutal one. This is not interesting because it violates an otherwise healthy legal conscience. It is interesting because it exposes how thin that conscience already was, how dependent it always was on asymmetry, and how quickly strategic fantasy collapses into managed repetition. The strikes did not produce the uprising they were imagined to catalyze. They did not reveal a credible end state. They revealed something colder: a form of violence that continues not because it is winning, but because the language capable of stopping it has already been hollowed out from within.

And that is precisely why the growing temptation to repair strategic emptiness by invoking Torah should be approached with caution. A source is not a substitute for an end state. Covenant is not doctrine. If strategy has become empty, it will not be redeemed by dressing force in deeper civilizational language. On the contrary: the greater danger is that Torah itself will be recruited as a legitimizing interface for a state that no longer knows where it is going. Israel does not need a more sacred vocabulary for strategic drift. It needs the courage to admit that no source, however deep, can save a political order that has confused repetition with purpose and force with direction.

This is no longer the age of declared wars. It is the age of undeclared permissions.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)