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Modern wars have always had their way of spawning quickly adopted cliches. Most of these are terrible, because they deaden our senses to the reality of war, reducing its horror and complexity to flat and anodyne thoughtlets.

One could make a very long list of them, but for brevity I’ll just offer a few: fog of war, boots on the ground, surgical strike, collateral damage, and hearts and minds.

Modern wars have always had their way of spawning quickly adopted cliches. Most of these are terrible, because they deaden our senses to the reality of war, reducing its horror and complexity to flat and anodyne thoughtlets.

One could make a very long list of them, but for brevity I’ll just offer a few: fog of war, boots on the ground, surgical strike, collateral damage, and hearts and minds.

There are two of these awful, formulaic ways of speaking about—or perhaps distancing ourselves from—the reality of warfare that are performing an extraordinary amount of work in discussions of the latest U.S. attacks on Iran.

Here I have in mind the casual and much-invoked phrase “bad guys,” which is favored by the bellicose U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; and the slightly more complicated claim that critics of the war “won’t shed any tears” for Iran’s rulers—a way of signaling that opposition to the conflict does not amount to sympathy for the militant clerics who have long governed the country.

These two expressions, favored by politicians on opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum, share a grave flaw: Their radical reductiveness preempts the serious thought that should accompany—and ideally precede—any resort to war.

The phrase “bad guys,” or its close cousin, “bad actor,” is by far the easier target. The world is not drawn in black and white, and thinking of it in that way is a recipe for action........

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