In less than a week, the Iranian regime has reportedly killed more people than the Russia–Ukraine war has taken in five years. Even if the numbers are exaggerated, disputed or politically weaponized, the moral shock behind the claim is real. It lands in the gut like a dropped plate in a quiet room. Something monstrous is happening, and the world is once again staring at its hands, asking what violence entitles us to do next.
This is the moment when the old reflex returns, bomb them. Not arrest them. Not isolate the individuals responsible. Not build slow, grinding pressure through diplomacy, sanctions, courts, or exposure. Bomb them. Turn cities into punctuation marks. Reduce complexity to smoke.
And now Donald Trump’s name floats back into the conversation, as if geopolitics were a wrestling ring and escalation a signature move. Would the scale of Tehran’s brutality justify American bombs falling on Iranian streets? Would it cleanse anything? Would it save lives in the long run, or simply rearrange who gets buried first?
There is a dangerous arithmetic that always appears in times like this. A regime kills X people. A foreign power responds by killing Y. The argument becomes a spreadsheet of corpses, as though morality were a balance sheet that could be settled by subtraction. But bombs do not target regimes. They target neighborhoods. They target apartment blocks where dissenters live. They target hospitals that already lack electricity. They target people who hate their government as much as any protester in exile does.
History has already written this lesson in several languages and several deserts. Airstrikes do not liberate populations. They trap them between tyrants and foreign fire. They turn internal resistance into nationalist obedience. They hand dictators their favorite gift, an external enemy to blame for everything.
If Trump were to order strikes on Iran, it would be sold as decisiveness. Strength. Moral clarity. The television graphics would glow red. The speeches would be thick with words like “line,” “limit,” and “unacceptable.” But the reality would be a familiar choreography: civilians running, officials hiding, radicals recruiting, and moderates disappearing into mass graves or mass silence.
There is also the small detail that bombing Iran would not be a controlled act. It would be the opening move in a regional chain reaction. Hezbollah does not sit still. The Gulf does not stay quiet. Oil does not remain cheap. Refugees do not politely line up. And wars, once invited, have terrible manners. They overstay. They eat generations.
Supporters of military action often frame the choice as binary: either you bomb, or you condone the killings. This is emotional blackmail disguised as strategy. One can oppose the Iranian regime’s brutality without endorsing the incineration of Iranian civilians. One can demand accountability elsewhere.
Trump, in particular, is drawn to theatrical violence. It photographs well. It simplifies messy realities into before-and-after clips. But governance is not cinema, and morality is not measured in shock value. The question is not whether Iran’s rulers deserve punishment. They almost certainly do. The question is who pays the price.
It will not be the men in secured compounds. It will not be the architects of repression. It will be the teacher who stayed neutral. The shop owner who stayed quiet. The child who learned geography from the sound of drones.
Calling this justice insults the word. There is something obscene about answering mass killing with mass killing and calling it responsibility. It is the logic of a burning house where the solution is more fire because the first fire was unjust.
The world does not suffer from a lack of weapons. It suffers from a lack of patience, imagination, and moral stamina. Punishing regimes without murdering their people is difficult. It is slow. It is unsatisfying to audiences raised on instant endings. But it is the only path that does not multiply the crime it claims to oppose.
If the past century has taught us anything, it is that bombs are excellent at destroying buildings and terrible at destroying ideas. Tyranny does not die in flames. It learns to breathe smoke.
So no, even if the numbers are true, even if the horror is real, even if our anger is justified, it is not an excuse to turn another country into a headline-shaped graveyard. Violence does not become ethical because it wears a different flag.
Justice demands more than louder explosions. It demands that we stop confusing revenge with rescue, and power with principle.
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