Déjà Vu in the Fog of War

Yet another Gulf War has arrived in earnest, and once again, the belligerents are missing the point.

In June 2025, the so-called twelve-day war was sold through the familiar screen-lit language of necessity, retaliation, and preemption. The follow-up, less than a year later, has not corrected those errors. It has deepened them as part of a new cycle of conflict that's embroiled the entire Gulf.

The names have changed, the footage is newer, and the justifications have been updated, but the same moral failures remain intact: intentions are still prized above actions, responsibility is still dissolved across institutions and chains of command, sovereignty is still treated as something states possess rather than something individuals possess, and beneath it all sits the ancient delusion that land can be morally appropriated through money, paperwork, and inherited claims stretching back centuries or millennia.

My previous article argued that modern war survives by collectivising guilt and excusing harm under the guise of good intentions. It pointed out that both Israel and Iran were speaking as if nations were singular persons with singular rights, fears, and destinies, while actual individuals were being blown apart in the name of those abstractions. 

It also insisted on four simple principles: outcomes matter more than intentions, moral responsibility rests with individuals, sovereignty belongs to persons rather than states, and property cannot be claimed with receipts, deeds, or monetary systems. Those principles are not merely still relevant. They are now even harder to ignore as yet another war in Iran quickly deepens into a new Gulf War.

One of the clearest examples is the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab on 28 February 2026. The latest reporting says a preliminary U.S. military investigation now appears to point to outdated targeting data as the likely cause of the strike. The casualty count varies across reports, but the range remains roughly 150 to 175 killed, many of them children. The investigation is still ongoing, the Pentagon is not calling it final, and the U.N. human rights office and U.N. experts have called for a prompt, impartial, and thorough investigation.

Bereaved relatives seeking public awareness of their lost loved ones.

Notice how quickly the moral centre shifts. A school is struck. Children die. Yet almost immediately, the event is looked at through the lens of intentionality rather than outcome. The data was outdated. The coordinates were obsolete. The strike was not meant for them. This is the old trick in modern dress: once intention becomes primary, counting the cost of harmful actions becomes negotiable. The visible outcome is horrific, but the moral pressure is reduced by inviting everyone to look away from what happened and toward what was supposedly meant.

Onto Responsibility

The same pattern applies to responsibility. When one man kills another directly, his hand is visible, and his choice is personal. When a state kills through missiles, intelligence packets, legal reviews, targeting cells, and approval chains, responsibility is spread so thin that it diffuses into no one being guilty for anything at all. 

The analyst relied on old data. The officer signed off on what he was given. The commander trusted the system. The politician trusted the commander. The nation acted in self-defence. By the end of this relay, nobody appears to have killed anyone, even though hundreds are dead. The pilot who fired the missile was just following lawful orders based on a chain of command. He was just defending his country and trying to provide for his family. Just like every soldier in every other army, at any other time in history.

Order-following soldiers on the front line with order-giver pointing fingers in the background.

It is essential to warn against exactly this moral outsourcing: evil committed under authority, subordination, and the excuse of following orders. That warning has aged well because the machinery of distributed blame has only become more sophisticated. Now, technology, including AI, can be blamed for others' mistakes.

Onto Sovereignty

And then there is sovereignty, one of the most abused words in the political vocabulary. Recycled politicians invoke it when they want freedom of action and discard it when they want freedom to violate someone else’s. But sovereignty, if it is to mean anything morally serious, begins not with flags, ministries, or borders, but with the individual body. A girl sitting in a classroom has a more immediate and legitimate claim to sovereignty than any military command, territorial doctrine, or ministerial decree. The same is true of the civilian living near a suspected facility, the conscript ordered into battle, and the dissenter trapped inside a national story he never chose.

To say that “Iran was attacked” or “Israel was attacked” is already to begin the moral distortion, because countries do not bleed; people do. Nations do not lose limbs, suffocate under rubble, or bury their children. Individuals do. The language of collective injury is useful to governments precisely because it blurs this fact. It turns millions of separate human beings into a single wounded abstraction, and then hands political elites the power to retaliate in their name.

U.S. War Department provides battle briefing while highlighting Iran's collective responsibility for its current predicament.

Neither Iran’s, nor Israel’s, nor America’s politicians have the moral right to collectivise millions of people and march them into war as though they were extensions of the state. And it is no small irony that those who speak most grandly of sacrifice are rarely the ones asked to make it. They do not usually send their own sons and daughters to die in the dust and fire of the policies they champion. More often, they send the sons and daughters of the lower and working classes, after saturating them with nationalism, myth, duty, fear, and the old romance of collective destiny. The result is a familiar obscenity: private citizens are taught to kill and die for abstractions authored by men who will never bear the cost in equal measure.

Once sovereignty is detached from the individual and transferred to the state, almost any abuse becomes imaginable. A government can claim to defend “its people” while treating actual people as expendable. It can speak of security while emptying homes, destroying schools, and sending boys to die for lines on a map. That is why sovereignty must be pulled back down from the level of the nation and returned to the person. Anything less turns human beings into inventory for war.

Onto Property

The oldest and perhaps deepest error lies underneath the whole conflict: the belief that land itself can be morally owned through deeds, purchases, archives, scriptures, imperial transfers, and ancestral memory. Both sides of this broader regional war lean on some version of it. One side cites property purchases, recent ties, and current occupation. The other cites biblical prophecy, state recognition, and civilisational inheritance.

No receipt, no registry, no title deed, and no story stretching back thousands of years can turn masses of unrelated living people into legitimate objects of expulsion, bombardment, or enclosure. Paper alone cannot determine rightful property because, once legitimacy is reduced to documents, it becomes possible, in principle, for someone to accumulate all the land and then deny everyone else access to it. That is not a moral foundation; it is merely an administrative mechanism for dispossession.

Satellite image of the "Holy Land" which devout Jews claim is decreed to them by God.

In truth, ownership is inextricably linked to control. We can own only what we control, and we can control only what we own. If someone tries to control something they don't own, or claims to own something they don't control -- those are two different forms of theft. Two people cannot own or control the same item at the same time.

Our bodies are the clearest example. We control our bodies because they are our own, and they are our own because we control them. That is why personal responsibility begins there. Whatever one’s body manifests in the world—whatever it builds, breaks, touches, or destroys—properly belongs within the sphere of one’s accountability.

The Truth Never Changes

That is what makes this second war worse, not merely later. The first round still allowed some people to tell themselves they were looking at a singular eruption, a tragic necessity, a temporary exception. The sequel removes that comfort. We are watching recurrence, not anomaly. The same rationalisations return because the underlying moral grammar has not changed. 

Intentions still outrank actions. Collectives still outrank individuals. Shared systems still dissolve personal guilt. Old claims to land still undermine an individual's ability to occupy vacant land. Moreover, zealous belief in ancient prophecy spanning thousands of square miles restrains people's ability to think for themselves and realise that property rights have been completely misunderstood.

Tehran buildings turned into rubble following air strikes in the opening days of the war. (March 2026)

And so the screens flicker again. More images, more maps, more strikes, more declarations, more sorrow announced by officials. But the moral picture remains brutally simple. If your action kills the innocent, your intention cannot erase it. One can only be responsible for their own actions, and never someone else's. If sovereignty means anything, it belongs only to the individual, and never to a state or a group. And if land claims allow thousands of innocent civilians to be brutalised for trespassing and squatting, it means they were never morally sound to begin with.

However, to accept all of the above, nationalism must be transcended. Patriotism, if the word is to retain any moral worth, should be narrowed to those concrete human bonds that actually bind us—friends, family, and the small circles of mutual obligation that arise from real life rather than abstraction. In the end, the only community for which a person can meaningfully be asked to sacrifice is not a nation, but something closer to a tribe: a lived, knowable, reciprocal community, not a mass of strangers gathered under a flag or a religion.

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Written by George Tchetvertakov