Alex Gervais ’28
Exec. Opinion and Design Editor
“The Pro-Peace Ticket.” “KAMALA WILL SEND YOUR SONS TO WAR.” “No new wars.” We were lied to over and over again by the Trump campaign. The American people were deceived. Now we stand on the precipice of doom, of another forever war in the Middle East.
In the early hours of Feb. 28, the US and Israel began military strikes in Iran, striking military and civilian targets including an attack on an elementary school in Iran that killed 165 people, including children. Iran responded, bombing NATO and Israeli military bases across the region and also hitting dozens of civilian targets. President Trump addressed the nation, calling for the forceful overthrow of the Iranian government and warning that “[t]he lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties.” Since then, at least four American servicemembers have been killed and more have been wounded in retaliatory attacks. Yet again, the Middle East stares down the barrel of another protracted American war, a storyline that we have seen far too many times this century and one that has spilled the blood of far too many innocent civilians.
Of course, Iran’s theological government is awful, its own people think so. Mass protests have been happening in the nation over the last few months, brave patriots putting their lives on the line for the dream of a freer, more equal Iran. Regime change must come for the Iranian people, but on their terms, not ours. The United States getting involved only spills more blood, history shows that Western intervention only hurts freedom fighters on the road to a more just Iran.
In 1953, the US government backed the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in Operation Ajax, a mission to protect Western oil interests. Mosaddegh was the popular, anti-monarchical leader of Iran. His efforts for land redistribution and his rebuke of Western control of the oil industry scared the Eisenhower state department so much that they astroturfed anti-communist sentiment in the country and bribed Iranian officials to help get him deposed. Mosaddegh’s overthrow led to the reinstatement of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s monarchical leader who quickly installed his own secret police and tried to modernize the nation and bring it closer to the West through massive military spending. In 1979 the Shah was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution, installing the theological regime that Iran lives under today. It was the West who began this process of regime change, but the Iranian people have had to pay with their lives and their freedom.
US backed regime change in the Middle East does not work, it only stokes the flames of resentment against the West and gets civilians and American servicemembers killed. It failed in Iraq, where an eight year war on terror failed to find weapons of mass destruction and left a power vacuum in the region, all the US having to show for it being countless human rights abuses and thousands of US veterans with cancer from open-air burn pits. It failed in Afghanistan, the US intervening to uproot the Taliban, embroiling itself in a 20 year war that only served to return control of the country back to the terrorist group. Our strategy simply perpetuates death for the sake of death: its only outcomes are flag draped coffins and military industrial complex profits, not actual, durable change.
I ask all of us in our campus community to oppose US intervention and our college not to profit off of it. We have a long tradition of anti-war demonstrations here at Trinity, let us write the next chapter in that history. The College must consider where its money is going and ensure that it does not profit off of US military intervention. Yes, it is uniquely profitable to invest in military contractors and support the infinite flow of deadly arms and munitions, but the moral cost of even a single drop of blood is far too high to justify any dollar amount in profit. The Board of Trustees must reexamine our endowment strategy and ensure our money is not going to aid in the murder of innocent civilians.
We must also allow ourselves to see the true goal of this war. It is not about the people of the US versus the people of Iran, it’s about the interests of the American ruling class versus the interests of the American people. It is no mistake that these military strikes come as President Trump’s approval rating approaches an all time low, as a proposed bipartisan War Powers Resolution was set to be voted on this week in Congress and as the Epstein Files very clearly point to Trump’s ultimate guilt. President Trump is putting the lives of millions on the line to distract from his own political problems, that’s all that this war is actually about. The dream of a democratic, free Iran must endure; it must not be swallowed up by the empty promises of a war mongering administration.
Alex, thank you for your article. I would like to respond to several points where I believe your argument overreaches. To cry “we were lied to” because military force was employed after a pledge of “no new wars” is to misunderstand the nature of governance in an unpredictable world. No administration can guarantee that novel threats will not arise, that adversaries will not escalate, or that intelligence will not reveal imminent danger requiring decisive action. A commitment to avoid needless wars is not a vow of perpetual inaction.
The invocation of a looming “forever war” is likewise imprecise. Not every strike begets occupation, nor does every act of force culminate in a twenty year quagmire. Limited, targeted operations aimed at degrading military capacity or deterring escalation differ categorically from regime building crusades. To collapse all uses of force into the specter of Iraq or Afghanistan is a hasty generalization, a conflation of unlike things. Prior Israeli and American actions against discrete Iranian assets have historically and overwhelmingly been swift and circumscribed, intended to extinguish conflagrations before they engulf the region, not to seed new ones.
History is summoned in the form of 1953, as though Operation Ajax alone begot the Islamic Revolution and all that followed. Such a narrative is seductively simple and profoundly incomplete. The revolution of 1979 was the fruit of manifold domestic currents, clerical mobilization, ideological radicalism, and internal upheaval, not the mechanical consequence of a single Western intrigue decades prior. To reduce complex national convulsions to one foreign intervention is to trade scholarship for slogan.
Most conspicuously absent is any sustained reckoning with the conduct of the Iranian regime itself. For decades, the Islamic Republic has not merely reacted to Western designs but has actively exported its own revolutionary doctrine through violence and proxy warfare. It has financed, armed, and directed a constellation of militant organizations including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Kata’ib Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al Haq in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and allied militias in Syria, dispensing sums that by credible estimates exceed a billion dollars annually.
Nor may one ignore Tehran’s persistent march toward advanced nuclear enrichment, its curtailment of inspections, and its repeated strain upon diplomatic accords. Engagement has been attempted, sanctions imposed, negotiations renewed and abandoned. To imply that force arises from caprice or political distraction rather than accumulated breaches and escalating capability is conjecture dressed as certainty.
The suggestion that military action serves merely to buoy sagging approval ratings or divert from scandal is a circumstantial indictment without proof. It imputes motive where evidence has not been furnished, reducing grave questions of security to the theater of partisan intrigue.
One may, in good conscience, oppose war. But opposition must be grounded in clear reasoning, not in slippery slopes and moral absolutism. To declare that any defense investment is tantamount to the “murder of innocent civilians” is to ignore the deterrent and protective functions such capacities serve. A world in which hostile regimes pursue proxies, missiles, and nuclear thresholds is not a world pacified by wish or slogan.
Peace is not preserved by denying the existence of threat. It is preserved, often grimly and sometimes decisively, by confronting it before it metastasizes. The matter at hand is not a choice between war and virtue, but between vigilance and neglect. Any serious discourse must reckon with that distinction.