Opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war against the Iranian government is nearly universal in the West. Polls show large majorities opposed in both the United States and Europe. Politicians across the spectrum, as well as the Pope, have called it strategically reckless and morally indefensible. These objections are serious. They are also wrong.
The ethical case in favor of pursuing this war against Iran is straightforward: bullies deserve to be punished, criminal dictators deserve to be overthrown, initiators of war deserve to lose them and totalitarian governments should be conquered.
The pragmatic argument in favor of this course of action is more complicated: The case is that the war is costly in terms of both treasure and human lives.
However, the central question isn’t whether this war carries costs. Every war does. All human action, in peace or in war, has a price. The question is whether the rewards outweigh the costs.
There are three key reasons as to why the benefits of the Iran war are greater than the costs:
1. The rights of Iranians need protection.
The rights to speak freely, assemble peacefully, practice one’s beliefs and participate in political life are not privileges granted by governments. They are universal human rights that belong to every individual regardless of nationality or where they happen to live.
For more than four decades, nearly 90 million Iranians have lived under a regime that systematically suppresses those basic human rights. Citizens can be imprisoned or even killed for criticizing the government, protesting in public, engaging in political opposition or advocating for greater freedom. Women have been imprisoned for removing a headscarf. Men have been executed for their sexual orientation.
When a government becomes the primary violator of its citizens’ rights, the principle of human rights does not stop at the border. Human rights belong to individuals, not states, and they do not become negotiable simply because the abuses occur within a particular country’s territory.
The international community cannot remain indifferent when millions of people are systematically denied their rights. At this point, to protect the rights of Iranians, there must be an intervention against the entity violating their rights—the Iranian government.
2. Iran’s government needs to be held accountable.
Critics of the war invoke the concept of “national sovereignty” like it’s a magic shield. Whatever a government does inside its own borders, the argument goes, is its own business.
That principle might apply to a legitimate government agreed to by its people, but the Islamic Republic of Iran is not one of them.
Governments derive their authority from a basic compact: Citizens grant the state its power, and the state protects their fundamental rights. The Islamic Republic broke that compact long ago with its violent suppression tactics, anti-freedom policies and outright mass murder of some 30,000 of its own citizens for protesting the regime.
Beyond Iran’s borders, the regime has spent decades funding and directing Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; organizations responsible for mass civilian casualties in Israel and sustained instability across the broader Middle East. Iran’s government is not simply an authoritarian state that mistreats its own people. It is a state that has exported violence as a tool of regional policy.
A government that operates this way has no legitimate claim to the sovereignty protections it demands from the international community.
Along with protecting the basic rights of Iranians, the Iranian government must be punished and held accountable for the violations it has committed.
3. The United Nations cannot protect Iranians or hold Iran’s government accountable.
The institutions built to prevent governments from slaughtering their own citizens have a well-documented response to the Islamic Republic: They tend to write reports about it.
After the massacre of protesters in Iran earlier this year, the United Nations produced empty statements and no action. It formally urged Iran to impose an immediate moratorium on executions—a request the regime ignored entirely. The International Criminal Court in the Hague issued no indictments. The ICC is presumably too busy doing exactly that for Israeli leaders, who are mobilizing their country for self-defense.
Rights without enforcement are not rights. They are aspirations written on paper. Something must enforce rights, and the United Nations has shown it cannot and will not.
The United States and Israel stepped in when the United Nations and the international community refused to do so. For the first time in decades, the Iranian regime is facing real consequences, not empty condemnations.
