A residential building destroyed in a missile strike on the Shahid Boroujerdi housing complex in southeast Tehran.Hossein Esmaeili/The Globe and Mail
It is an intense and desperate impotence, watching the hell of war, even from a great distance. Whether in your name or not, you’re caught up in it, simply as a citizen of the world. And a human being.
What can you do, beyond agonize at this unilateral decision to go to war, its alarming expansion, the lives lost, the global instability of this moment, this turn of history happening on our helpless watch, the hit to our household budgets, the sheer lunacy of the guy calling the shots, while the new leader of Iran is described as “the most dangerous person in the world” (by an Iranian acquaintance in The Atlantic). And that was before not just Mojtaba Khamenei’s father, but also his mother, wife and one of his children, were killed in air strikes launched by the joint U.S.-Israel attack. How dangerous would that make even an average person?
The Iranian regime is an oppressive autocracy that outlaws homosexuality and treats women appallingly, where girls can marry at 13 (or be forced by their fathers to marry at a younger age), to quote just one aspect of a troubling Amnesty International report that also cites inhuman detention conditions, unfair trials and arbitrary executions in 2024. More recently, the regime killed thousands of its own citizens during January’s courageous anti-government uprising.
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This is why many in the Iranian diaspora celebrated the launch of this war. But how to square your country’s possible liberation (and that the possibility of regime change appears slim) with the terror of knowing your loved ones back home are in the line of fire of powerful, sometimes erroneous if not indiscriminate, bombs?
“It was like hell. They were bombing everywhere, every part of Tehran,” a resident told Reuters overnight Monday. “My children are afraid to sleep now. We have nowhere to go.”
The Iranian regime openly despises the West and calls for the annihilation of Israel. It supports Hamas and Hezbollah. Its nuclear potential is indeed an existential terror. How imminent a threat this is – or was – is a matter of debate among experts.
What this war will do to extinguish the threat – or amplify it – is also under debate. “A war that was meant to prevent Iran from having a bomb could be the war that actually pushed Iran beyond the Rubicon to reach a bomb,” Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of the Iran branch of Israel’s military intelligence, told The New York Times.
It is not to discount the horrors of the Iranian regime to mourn the war’s losses and feel anguish over its possibilities. War, the song asks: what is it good for?
War is good for killing innocent civilians, including children attending elementary school in Tehran, their schoolwork and backpacks scattered in the dusty aftermath as workers frantically dig for survivors.
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War is good for sending young men and women into death battles to fight for the ambitions of powerful or power-hungry men, far-removed from their own lives.
War is good for escalating gas prices even far, far away from the action (as in Vancouver, where gas was $1.83/litre on Monday) as supply chains clog up.
War is excellent for stoking justified fears of a 1970s-like energy crisis. War is excellent at stoking justified fears, period. It is fantastic for global destabilization – economic, geopolitical.
War is good for stirring up and escalating troubling hatreds that already exist.
War is very good for blood-pressure spikes, feelings of anxiety, terror, frustrating powerlessness and anger over a world-rocking event that you have had no say in or control over. One might call this mishmash of feelings an epic fury.
All you can do is watch in horror and disbelief as the White House releases a propaganda video featuring Hollywood film clips to boost its war, and as the President of the United States rates the war in a CNN interview on Friday as a 12 or 15 out of 10.
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Then there’s Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who sits on Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet, warning that Israel is going to make part of Lebanon resemble Gaza – a threat and a brag.
They are talking about people’s lives. This is not a movie to be promoted or rated. This is the destruction of real places, the ending of real lives, a scary turn in real history, with consequences we can only predict.
War is good for raising the temperature of an already turbulent time, for dialling up the uncertainty for young generations already anxiety-ridden by economic conditions and murky employment opportunities, paralyzed by impending environmental disaster and socially stunted by a wonky COVID-interrupted upbringing.
War is good for absolutely nothing that is good. One marvels that we have to say this again.