“We are just getting started,” Trump’s secretary of “war,” Pete Hegseth, said this week, adding that the attacks on Iran will escalate, with “death and destruction all day long.”

So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran, according to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 years old who were killed when a missile directly hit their school. 

Wars can be morally justifiable if they are necessary to protect a nation’s people, but Trump has failed to make the case that this war is necessary. His allegation that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and much of the intelligence community. 

As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

This moral aspiration lies at the center of America’s founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the........

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