The Iran War Has Clear Objectives; That’s Why No One in Washington Will Name Them
A familiar refrain has emerged from the so-called “opposition” to the Iran campaign: What is the strategy? What is the endgame? Where are the clear objectives? How does this liberate the Iranian people? Prominent members of Congress and media commentators alike repeat these questions as though the principal indictment of bombing a sovereign nation’s civilian infrastructure is that the bombing lacks a sufficiently tidy PowerPoint slide.
I have written previously about the discursive structure that governs imperial self-critique: not why, but how. Never “Should we be bombing Iran?” but “Did the President brief the right committee first?” To its credit, The Nation at least recognized the pattern, calling out Democratic leadership for mustering only “limited process critiques and vague handwringing” — though it took the piece 1,400 words to arrive at what should have been its opening sentence: “The only way to read this half-hearted response from the Democratic Party leadership is de facto support.” Of course it is. The Democrats are not confused about this war. They support it.
But because the legitimation architecture of liberal democracy requires that every imperial conquest be dressed in the correct language, support cannot be stated plainly. It must be laundered through procedural complaint. The structure tolerates — even welcomes — such challenges to how the empire operates. Procedural objections, after all, serve the structure well: they consume the oxygen of opposition while leaving the edifice untouched. Whether the empire should — that question has no permissible form.
Yet procedural complaints are not exclusively instruments of obfuscation — they also carry claims of their own. When Hakeem Jeffries demands “clear objectives,” when Elizabeth Warren says the administration cannot explain “the goals we’re trying to accomplish,” when Richard Blumenthal warns there is “no endgame” — embedded in these critiques is a substantive claim: the premise that the war is aimless. Incoherent. That the empire is bumbling.
This is wrong.
The war has objectives. They are simply not objectives that can survive contact with the legitimation architecture of liberal democracy — the entire ideological apparatus that requires every imperial war be framed as a virtuous battle against WMDs or for “democracy” and women’s rights. Name liquidation as the objective and you do not merely lose a talking point, you collapse the superstructure that makes the project reproducible across administrations, across parties, across decades.
The true objective cannot be named by those scaffolding the structure that the objective serves. The framework does not suppress critique so much as render it unintelligible” — there is no committee to receive it, no resolution to house it, no form in which it can be entered into the record.
But we are under no obligation to live within their illusion. We know the story. We know the script. The goal is not liberation. The goal is liquidation.
The Empire Built What it Claims to Fight
The U.S. war on Iran has nothing to do with the nuclear program, nothing to do with democracy, nothing to do with women’s rights — this is a country where nearly 70% of university graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are women and whose female enrollment in engineering ranked first in the world.
One can recognize the Islamic Republic, like all theocracies, as repugnant — and simultaneously recognize why it exists. It exists because the United States couped Mossadegh in 1953, installed a pliant monarch, and had him liquidate every socialist and communist in the country through SAVAK, a secret police apparatus whose agents were trained by the CIA. The overthrow was not merely a geopolitical maneuver; it was a structural purge of the secular left. When you exterminate the secular left, you guarantee that the opposition which eventually prevails will not be secular.
The playbook was identical in Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s first contacts with U.S. intelligence date to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized squad to assassinate Prime Minister Qasim. After the 1963 Ba’ath coup, the CIA provided kill lists of suspected communists and leftists — over a hundred thousand were arrested, thousands executed. Saddam’s faithful service to the empire was, of course, famously rewarded with a trip to the gallows.
The empire does not hate theocrats and dictators. It manufactures them. It hates the ones who stop taking orders.
Iran’s Crime is its Independence
Iran is a holdout. Ninety million people, a real military, a strategic chokepoint of global commerce, and enormous oil reserves. That is the crime. Iran is one of the last regional powers capable of challenging the empire’s forward operating base — its armed, nuclear-backed, ethno-supremacist apartheid outpost in occupied Palestine.
Consider the neighborhood. The U.S. inherited every fraudulent petro-monarchy that Britain and France drew on a napkin. Egypt, the most populous country in the region, is kept structurally impoverished. Jordan functions as a client state. The U.S. unleashed ISIS on Assad — another leader who defied the entity — and installed, atop the rubble, an ISIS commander whose principal qualification was a proven willingness to do as Washington tells him.
The region has been systematically re-engineered through sanctions, proxy wars, and regime destruction into a lattice of client states and dependency economies.
Iran is the exception, and that is why this war was inevitable.
Liquidation as Policy
The goal is to Syria-fy Iran. The model is not new. Under Obama, the United States armed and funded Syrian “opposition groups” through a billion-dollar CIA program called Timber Sycamore — a program that directly armed ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates, a fact then-Vice President Biden himself confirmed, admitting that U.S. allies were funneling weapons to al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and jihadist elements indiscriminately. The result, years later, was the total disintegration of the Syrian state and the reduction of an ancient civilization to a factional wasteland.
That was not a failure. That was the product.
The same logic now governs the war on Iran:
Bomb the water treatment plants.
Bomb the electrical grid.
Bomb the fuel depots.
Bomb the schools.
Bomb the hospitals.
Terrorize the population long enough, degrade the infrastructure severely enough, inflict sufficient suffering, and the state’s capacity to govern erodes on its own. The government does not need to be overthrown in the conventional sense — it needs only to be made unable to function. The resultant vacuum can be filled by any combination of factions — monarchists, separatists, Islamists, ethnic militias, Western-aligned compradors. It does not matter who fills the void — what matters is that the void exists.
A fragmented, dysfunctional Iran is not a “risk” of the campaign.
It is the purpose of the campaign. It is the endgame.
They Already Know
And there is reason to believe the “opposition” knows this. Reporting by Aída Chávez revealed that top Democrats worked behind the scenes to delay war powers votes until after the bombing had already begun. According to a senior foreign policy aide to Chuck Schumer, the preferred outcome of many AIPAC-aligned Senate Democrats was that “Trump acts unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash ahead of the midterms.” They do not oppose the liquidation, only the optics of owning it. This is not hypocrisy. It is the system functioning exactly as designed — the structure permits critique of execution precisely because such critique poses no threat to the project itself.
So when a critic embedded in this structure asks “How does this liberate the Iranian people?” — that is precisely the right question, asked for precisely the wrong reason. It does not liberate them. It was never designed to liberate them. Liberation is the language of all imperial invasions; but liquidation is always the objective.
The campaign against Iran is coherent, consistent with decades of imperial practice, and entirely legible within a materialist framework: destroy the last major regional power capable of independent action, reduce it to chaos, and eliminate the final obstacle to uncontested hegemony from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Liberation is not among the objectives. It never has been — not in Iran, not in Iraq, not in Syria, not anywhere the empire has ever set foot. Now you know why no one in Washington will say it.
https://realdialectical.substack.com/p/the-war-on-iran-has-objectives-but