Another Reason for Regime Change: Iran’s Flagrant Assault on the Rules of War

Iran’s response to the war launched by the United States and Israel provides a reason beyond pure American self-interest to end the rule of the ayatollahs. Tehran not only retaliated against American and Israeli military facilities, as would be its right in self-defense. It also broadened the conflict by attacking civilians in neighboring countries uninvolved in the war. A regime that launches systematic warfare against civilians violates the core rules of civilized warfare far in excess of any harm it has suffered from the attacks. The United States and Israel would do the world enormous good by ending a regime that flouts our common moral norms in such a flagrant and destructive manner.

The moral norms find their voice in the laws of war, which international lawyers today call the laws of armed conflict. These laws include two discrete sets of rules. Jus ad bellum refers to the right to go to war. Jus in bello sets the rules governing the conduct of war. Violating one does not affect the justice of obeying the other. For example, Nazi Germany may have violated jus ad bellum by launching unprovoked wars of aggression in Europe, but the United States still had an obligation to follow the Geneva Conventions toward Germany, and vice versa. Similarly, scrupulously following the rules of combat does not transform an illegal war into a legal one.

A reader only of the mainstream media and the pronouncements of elected politicians and international officials would leave with the impression that the United States is the great criminal under these rules, and that Iran is simply a helpless victim. Defenders of the “international rules-based order,” as they call it, accuse the United States of violating jus ad bellum. Of course, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.-Minn.) immediately leaped to the ramparts and declared: “President Trump is unilaterally dragging this nation into an illegal and unjustified war with Iran without congressional authorization, without a clear objective, and without any imminent threat to the United States.”  But criticism also came from within Trump’s own tent. Joe Kent, Trump’s former counter-terrorism advisor, notably resigned because “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

International leaders agree. A joint statement issued on March 12 by UN Special Rapporteurs condemned the United States and Israel as aggressors and described the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran as “entirely illegal under international law.” Mohamad Safa, an UN Human Rights Council official, wrote on X: “As accredited representative at UNHRC, working in international law for over 10 years, I’ve an obligation to clear this: Trump is a war criminal. Netanyahu is a war criminal.” Australian Senator Nick McKim declared, “This is the man you have tied Australia’s future to. He is a fascist, a war criminal, and delusional.” Human rights activist Peter Tatchell likewise argued that Trump “wanted to go down as a great war leader; instead, he’ll go down as a war criminal.” Even socialist mayors piled on. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani parroted these accusations. He described the February 28 strikes as “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” accusing the United States and Israel of “bombing cities” and “killing civilians.”

Many of the loudest critics hold President Trump individually responsible. “No one else is responsible for this situation except Donald Trump,” said Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Trump is “naive” and “stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he declared. “Nobody else is responsible” for the chaos in the Middle East,” former CIA Director John Brennan echoed. House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on CNN that the administration had “no vision, no plan, no exit strategy” and “clearly didn’t anticipate” the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Bloomberg’s editorial board called the President’s 48-hour ultimatum to Iran “reckless escalation.” They essentially accuse President Trump of being a war criminal.

These allegations miss the mark. The United States has not violated jus ad bellum so much as it is seeking to change it to take account of weapons of mass destruction, missile technology, and rogue nations. The U.N. Charter formally prohibits nations from using force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. Customary international law, however, which reflects the rules developed through nation-state practice over the centuries, recognizes that self-defense includes the right to use force in anticipation of an attack. I argue that the laws of war must also expand to take into account the magnitude of a threatened attack as well as its timing. A state has the right to intervene before an enemy launches a cross-border invasion; it should have the ability to strike even earlier if the enemy possesses ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Indeed, the United States is acting to defend its NATO allies far more than it is defending itself. On March 8, Iran launched intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, a joint US-UK base more than 4,000 miles from Iranian territory. The strike revealed that virtually every major European capital is within Iranian missile range.

But even under this reformed approach to jus ad bellum, Iran’s use of force in self-defense violates international norms. Blind to the double standards they apply to Israel and the United States, domestic and foreign leaders ignore Iran’s outright violation of the civilized rules of combat. Iran has every right to defend itself by using force against the United States and Israel. But Iran’s response has gone far beyond that: it has tried to defend itself by attacking every nation nearby. It has launched missiles and drones at Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan—sovereign countries that were not parties to the conflict. It has attacked neutral vessels in the Persian Gulf and prevented them from passing through the Strait of Hormuz. It has launched wars of its own against nations that had committed no aggression against Iran. Nor did these neutral nations pose a threat of attack against Iran, which would have justified anticipatory self-defense.

Iran’s violations of jus in bello have reached an even higher level of immorality compared to its already egregious violations of jus ad bellum. The United States and Israel have sought to conduct the war with the highest regard for minimizing civilian casualties possible. While the war has no doubt caused civilian casualties, the laws of war accept that attacks might cause harm to civilians as a secondary, collateral effect of attacks on the military. Since February 28, the two countries have struck more than nine thousand targets inside Iran. The targets have been overwhelmingly military and strategic: IRGC bases, ballistic missile launchers, air defense batteries, radar installations, nuclear enrichment facilities, and regime command infrastructure.   The exception proves the rule: the United States has launched an extensive self-investigation into an alleged Tomahawk strike on an Iranian elementary school on February 28. The strike might have resulted from mistaken intelligence — the school apparently sat adjacent to an Iranian base — or malfunctioning weapons. But no American leader claims that the United States had any right to deliberately strike schools or other purely civilian targets. Any American targeting of a school, hospital, or home triggers immediate publicity and condemnation. Even President Trump’s recent threats to strike Iran’s electrical grid and power generators would fairly fall within legally-acceptable attacks on dual-use facilities that supply both civilian and military activities — the Clinton administration disabled Serbian electrical networks during the Kosovo war under the same theory.

Compare the American attention to discriminating between military and civilian targets with Iran’s strikes. Iran struck major civilian targets in neighboring countries, including residential buildings, airports, utilities, and ports. Iran hit the Aramco complex at Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, the Ras Laffan LNG facility in Qatar, oil and gas facilities in the UAE, and a water desalination plant in Bahrain, none of which are American military assets. It fired missiles at the old city of Jerusalem, landing fragments 1,200 meters from the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It struck residential areas in Dimona and Arad, wounding over a hundred civilians, including children. It has fired more than 350 ballistic missiles at Israel, roughly half carrying cluster munitions designed to scatter explosive bomblets in civilian neighborhoods. It has continued to publicly execute its own citizens (in addition to the thousands it killed before the war started), including a nineteen-year-old wrestling champion for protesting.

The neutral status of these nations did not matter. The Gulf states, for their part, had given Tehran repeated assurances before the war and up to its eve that their territories would not be used to launch attacks against Iran. On March 5, Tehran itself thanked Saudi Arabia for honoring that commitment. Then it kept bombing Saudi infrastructure anyway. Compared to the avalanche of criticism directed at President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, the international response to Iran’s conduct has been relatively silent. In a UN Security Council emergency session on February 28, Iran’s Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani pledged that Iran would not target the sovereignty or interests of its neighbors and would strike only American bases and assets on their soil. Within days, that promise evaporated.

Even more egregious is Iran’s efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes and a waterway governed by the international law of the sea, which guarantees free passage to all neutral nations. Closing the narrow waterway to neutral shipping has caused oil prices to spike and threatens the global economy. Tehran’s disruption of the Strait is pure economic blackmail against the rest of the world. IRGC spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari told state media: “Get ready for the oil barrel to be at $200, because the oil price depends on the regional security which you have destabilised.” The spokesman for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters declared that Iran had “full control” over the strait and was managing it “smartly and powerfully.” He added: “With this level of power, there is no need to lay mines.” In the same breath, he warned that Iran would use “any means necessary” to secure the waterway and that “extra-regional countries” had no right to interfere.

Iran effectively attacks the rest of the world by targeting purely civilian ships. According to US intelligence officials, Iran has deployed at least a dozen underwater mines in the strait including Iranian-manufactured Maham 3 and Maham 7 devices equipped with magnetic and acoustic sensors that detonate autonomously when a ship passes nearby. Although the US military has destroyed forty-four Iranian minelaying vessels near the strait, Iran still retains 80 to 90 percent of its minelaying vessels (meaning it could seed hundreds more). Iran is attacking the world’s civilian economy as part of its strategy to draw in neutral nations into the conflict.

Iran’s strategy violates the bedrock rule of armed conflict: no intentional targeting of civilians. We can have legitimate debates about whether individual targets have dual military and civilian value. But Iran is not operating in that gray area. The IRGC has repeatedly struck purely civilian targets throughout this war. It has launched cluster munitions into residential neighborhoods, damaged historic religious sites in Jerusalem, and struck apartment buildings and civilian infrastructure across the region. Missile barrages have continued unabated, with at least eight launched in a single night since 10 p.m., sending civilians scrambling for shelter. Israeli defenses intercepted several projectiles, but others penetrated the shield, including a missile carrying a roughly 220-pound warhead that struck Tel Aviv, leaving multiple civilians injured and requiring emergency medical treatment. When a cluster munition struck an apartment building in Ramat Gan, killing two Israeli civilians in their seventies, the IRGC publicly celebrated the killings as “revenge for the blood” of a slain Iranian official.

The UN and other nations have shown their disrespect for the rules they allegedly obey in their silence on Iran. A joint statement issued on March 12 by UN Special Rapporteurs ran for more than a dozen paragraphs condemning the United States and Israel as aggressors and describing the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran as “entirely illegal under international law.” Yet the same statement barely addressed Iran’s retaliatory strikes against civilian targets, which included desalination infrastructure and residential towers in neighboring Gulf countries. It said nothing about Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, despite the direct risk such action poses to neutral nations and global commerce. Nor did it address the regime’s execution of protesters or its broader campaign against civilians.

The rules of war are not complicated. Militaries may strike military targets. Militaries may not deliberately target civilians or threaten the commerce of neutral nations. Iran has crossed those lines repeatedly. Tehran’s flouting of all the rules of morality in war explains why the United States and Israel were right to confront the Islamic Republic now, rather than wait for its threat to gain in strength in the future, potentially wielding nuclear weapons.

John Yoo is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin.