At dawn on February 28, explosions tore through central Tehran, University Street, Jomhouri Square, districts not far from the offices of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel had struck Iran. It declared a state of emergency and braced for retaliation. The United States has provided support for what was described as a pre-emptive strike.

The language is always familiar. We have heard it before, in Kabul in 2001, in Baghdad in 2003, across Syrian skies for more than a decade. Each time, the argument is moral clarity. An evil regime must be checked. A future catastrophe must be prevented. A threat must be neutralised before it matures.

And yet, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria, the region has not been healed by bombing campaigns. It has been fractured by them. Let us begin with honesty. Iran’s leadership has been repressive. Protests have been crushed. Dissent has been punished. Many Iranians themselves have risked their lives to challenge the state. That reality is not in dispute. But Iran’s brutality at home does not confer moral immunity on external attackers.

When Israel, backed by the United States, strikes Iran in the name of preventing nuclear proliferation, the argument collides with an uncomfortable fact: Both countries possess nuclear arsenals. Iran does not. The justification offered is that their weapons are stabilising; Iran’s hypothetical ones would be destabilising.

If nuclear weapons are catastrophic, they........

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