How Power Works: Iran: why do we allow states to wage war?

Each week I look at one major international event and try to explain the structures of power behind it — the actors, ideologies and assumptions shaping events.

The Event

American and Israeli bombing of Iran continues. The US alone claims to have hit well over five thousand targets; Israel, thousands more. The Iranian government reports that over 1300 civilians have been killed.

This is a war of choice. It did not have to happen. Yet even though the majority of voters in the US and Europe do not support the war, it continues, with no definite end in sight. The systems of democracy seem unable to restrain a bellicose and feckless presidency.

This tells us something important about how power actually works.

Who gave the government permission to wage war — to bomb, to kill? I do not recall giving my consent. So why?

Inside the System: how governments and institutions think

As a British diplomat, I was closely involved in several wars: the ejection of Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 (‘Desert Storm’), the bombing of Iraq in 1998 (‘Desert Fox’), the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the initiation of the ‘Global War on Terror’ in 2001, and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was also peripherally involved in the Bosnian war of the early ‘nineties and the Kosovo war of 1999.

I wasn’t on the front lines. I never saw combat. But I was very much part of the machine inside government that conducts war. In 1991, as a junior official in the ‘political/military unit’ of the Foreign Office ‘Emergency Unit’, I wrote ‘lines to take’ for my ministers excusing the bombing of holy sites in Iraq. I analysed intelligence on Iraq’s weaponry, constructed soundbites about the threat from Scud ballistic missiles, and counted the troops and tanks in Iraq’s army. In 1998, I wrote the UK’s statement at the UN Security Council explaining how the Saddam regime’s failure to allow a few inspections for WMD gave the US and UK permission to conduct hundreds of airstrikes across Iraq. On 12 September 2001, I negotiated the UN Security Council resolution condemning the attacks of the day before, a resolution that began the institutional and legal construction of the ‘global war on terror’ that continues to this day. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, I delivered to Kofi Annan’s personal office — by hand — the formal notification, on headed paper, from the UK government justifying the military action as self-defence and therefore legal under the UN Charter.

When you join a government institution like the Foreign Office, though a civil ministry not the armed forces, you suddenly become much closer to war. As a government servant, you are not taught about war. Like many things in government, how you conduct yourself in war is taught through example, ‘learning by doing’ and breathing the air of government — witnessing how colleagues talk, how they write, how they think. The teaching is implicit, not explicit. Working in the diplomatic service is probably most closely related to being a soldier — or a monk: a close-knit community with clear if unstated rules of conduct and a rigid mental paradigm of how to think about the world.

An important element of that mental paradigm is the state’s right to wage war. This right is totally unquestioned within the government. No one says ‘who gave us permission to use military force, to drop bombs, fire missiles, kill other people?’. If you did utter such a question out loud, not only would others look at you oddly, you would receive a poor personnel report if not be immediately shuffled off to some unimportant desk. You would become a kind of internal ‘untouchable’. If you are ambitious, as I was, you very quickly realise that the route to advancement lies very much through not questioning such basic presumptions; instead, the opposite: you should act and talk as if you are steeped in these philosophies, understand them and are hard-headed and pragmatic — unemotional — about enacting them.

In a bunker underneath Whitehall, thousands of miles from the battlefield in Iraq or Kuwait, I was working on killing people, though I never considered it that way at the time. And 100% of those involved, from the registry clerks to the senior directors and under-secretaries, do not question it. At all. Ever. At its most extreme, most people do not question the state’s right to manufacture and deploy — and thus potentially use — weapons that have the capability to kill millions. On the face of it, this is very odd indeed.

What Everyone is Getting Wrong

I suspect that many members of the public assume that there is some kind of deep calculation and moral consideration that takes place inside government before launching wars. This presumably is one reason they do not question government’s right to wage war: that the government is competent, both morally and practically, to do so. I never saw such reflection in the government in any of the wars I was involved in. And the evidence suggests the very opposite is true. The investigation into the Iraq War of 2003, the Chilcot Inquiry, tells a story of serial incompetence, deficient preparation, miscalculation and, of course, lying.

My experience, including in the months that followed 9/11, is that governments, as in most things they do, are kind of swept along by events — the demands of allies, headlines in the press, political pressure, an inchoate ‘sense’ that something — anything — must be done. This is very much not a measured, cold-eyed, rational calculation of the pros and cons of military action, let alone a reckoning of the moral rights and wrongs of any such action. Governments don’t ‘do’ morals.

And today we have another example in Trump and Netanyahu’s feckless and ill-prepared war against Iran. It is now clear that Trump had not the slightest clue of why he launched this needless war. Netanyahu had more of a reason, but his motives one suspects have very little to do with the strategic need he claims. And as for moral calculation, of course there is not the smallest sign. Both leaders feel entitled to shed the blood of others, including their own citizens and hundreds of children (in Lebanon as well as Iran), if necessary in large quantities.

So, while the appalling irresponsibility of these men is rightly a focus of scrutiny, what goes unscrutinised and unquestioned is their right to take such action in the first place. In other words, the right of governments to wage war — and moreover to wage war without moral consideration. Both inside government and in the public realm, this right, and its intrinsic amorality, is simply assumed.

The Deeper Current: what are the forces and beliefs that shape this outcome?

There is of course an historical angle to all this. At some point, the state took to itself the right to kill. There is no precise origin point, of course, but that moment lies in the eras of kings and queens, emperors and pharaohs, hardly a recommendation of legitimacy. But does the history matter in any case? Does history confer legitimacy, particularly in such profound moral questions — namely the right to kill? Does the fact that we have inherited this situation make it right? Of course not.

The system of states is a state of affairs. It is a set of human relationships. It is a collection of lines on a map, most very arbitrarily drawn, most born in war, most settled by a balance of violence. It is, above all, a way of thinking about how to organise human affairs. And it is not, by this token, in any way fixed. It is not a given, yet we treat it as such.

One more often hears the ‘logical’ argument for the state’s right to use force: that the state guarantees its population security, if necessary by wielding violence. We can nevertheless question this supposed logic. If you define security in terms of the protection of human life, the state historically has not done a very good job — rather the contrary. Far more people have died at the hands of the state than of any other entity or actor.

Can the conduct of the state in wartime be constrained? Yes. Once states were permitted to do anything — kill, eviscerate, deny medical care, slaughter civilians. Now there are rules prohibiting such conduct: the Geneva Conventions. These rules are often violated, but they exist, and states feel compelled at least to pretend to respect them. 196 states have signed them.

How did those laws originate? One man, Henri Dunant, witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 — thousands of wounded abandoned without care, dying in their own filth and blood. Horrified, he resolved to act. His efforts led, within a few years, to the creation of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention. In other words, a single individual challenged what had been assumed: that governments could wage war without restraint. That assumption did not survive.

Could the state’s right to kill be removed today? One conclusion we might draw from Dunant’s story is the importance of bearing witness. It was his witnessing of the horrors of Solferino, then his telling of those horrors1, that helped inspire the birth of the Geneva Conventions.

One reason the broader assumption of the right of governments to kill persists is that the consequences of violence remain too often invisible. There are very few images of the victims of the firebombing of Hamburg or Dresden, or Tokyo. Reporters were not allowed to visit Hiroshima immediately after the bomb. Governments and militaries have consistently restricted access to the scenes of their violence, whether in Gaza, Ukraine or elsewhere.

By contrast, one factor in reducing popular support in America for the Vietnam War was that journalists accompanied soldiers and witnessed their deaths in combat. The ubiquity of mobile phone video is beginning to erode governments’ ability to control the portrayal of war. But we are not yet at the point of full democratisation of the image of war. Established media still carries more authority than fragmented, easily dismissed footage from those on the ground.

For a long time, mainstream media has often chosen not to show the most disturbing images of war - the sorts of atrocities one can now see on social media: torture, executions, decapitations. This protects the viewer from horror — but it also protects the perpetrator from full accountability. Because we do not see the effects of violence, we do not grasp its full weight. We do not see the direct line from Trump’s decision to a dead child.

The powerful reaction to the attacks of 9/11 was shaped in part by the fact that the world watched them in real time. By contrast, much of the violence carried out by states remains unseen or only partially seen. The consequences are mediated, filtered, or obscured.

Seeing is emotional, visceral. Knowing is more rational, more abstract. And we know which produces the stronger response.

Even where images do circulate, they are often incomplete. The ‘gun camera’ view of war — the crosshairs, the explosion — has become ubiquitous. But it rarely shows what happens afterwards: the bodies, the injuries, the screams, the death: the human reality of the strike. The violence is visible; its consequences are not. This asymmetry serves the wielder of power.

Thus the moral reality of state violence is systematically obscured. And in the absence of that reality — fully seen, fully felt — the deeper assumption of the state’s right to wage war endures.

Conclusion

The assumption that governments have the right to wage war — to kill in our name — is so deeply embedded in politics and culture that it is rarely even noticed, let alone questioned. It is treated as natural, inevitable, part of the furniture of the world.

But it is not. It is a human construction: a set of ideas, habits and institutional practices that have been built over time, and sustained by repetition and belief. Like all such constructions, it depends on our continued - and silent - acquiescence.

As Gustav Landauer wrote:

“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.”

The history of war itself shows that what once seemed unquestionable can, in fact, be challenged. There was a time when governments believed they could conduct war without restraint. One man witnessed the reality of war, and confronted that assumption. Rules (and norms) changed. Limits were introduced. What had been taken for granted was, at least in part, dismantled.

The same may be true of the broader assumption that governments possess an inherent right to wage war. It persists not because it is morally settled or politically justified, but because it remains largely unexamined.

To question it is not to deny the existence of conflict or danger. It is simply to ask whether the power to kill on such a scale should be assumed, or instead subjected to the same scrutiny, doubt and moral inquiry that we would apply to any other profound human decision.

The structures of power that produce war - that kill small children, horribly - are not immutable. They are made. And therefore they can be unmade.

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