There are wars fought for survival. There are wars fought for resources. There are wars fought, however misguidedly, for ideology. And then there is Donald Trump's illegal war against Iran, a war so bereft of coherent justification, so naked in its opportunism, and so catastrophic in its execution that future historians will struggle to find a category in which to place it. The dumbest war in living memory has found its author, and he is currently sitting in the most powerful position, explaining that he knows nothing about a bombed school or a destroyed desalination plant, and that Iranians are in any case, according to him, "among the most evil people ever on earth."
Let us dispense, first, with the pretexts.
This is not a war for security. The Arms Control Association has noted plainly that such a war of choice against Iran, without congressional approval, violates the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act, as well as Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations. Iran was, by all credible accounts, still engaged in diplomatic talks on the very day the US and Israel missiles began to fall on civilian targets.
IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said on 2 March 2026 that the agency had found no evidence of "a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons" in Iran, and when asked directly whether Iran was "days or weeks away from building a bomb," his response was simply "no." Iran was still engaging in reportedly productive diplomatic talks over its nuclear program the day before the United States unleashed its weaponry. Security was never the point. If it were, you do not blow up the table at which the other party is prepared to sit.
This is not a war for oil, at least not in the way that cynics once imagined. American and Israeli strikes have, for the first time, targeted oil storage and refining facilities in Tehran. You do not secure a resource by incinerating it. What you do achieve, however, is a surge in global oil prices that enriches investors (including Trumps family members) and producers elsewhere, rattles markets, and inflicts immediate pain upon ordinary consumers, including New Zealanders whose import-dependent economy has absolutely no insulation from such shocks.
This is not a war to free the Iranian people either. The liberation narrative has long served as the humanitarian mask of American imperialism, and it fits no better here than it did in Iraq. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that the United States attacked a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island, with water supply to thirty villages impacted. You do not liberate a population by destroying the infrastructure upon which their survival depends. The Geneva Conventions are unambiguous: targeting facilities indispensable to civilian survival constitutes a war crime.
When Trump was asked about the desalination plant, he offered this remarkably incoherent response: "I know nothing about a desalinisation plant, other than to say, if they're complaining about..." He then trailed off into fresh denunciations of October 7, conflating Iran and Hamas as though the distinction were a bureaucratic inconvenience rather than a basic fact.
Bombing schoolchildren does not liberate them. Bombing desalination plants does not free people. It starves them, and it breeds a generation for whom the word "America" will forever cause resentment and anger across the entire world.
What this war actually is becomes clearer the more one examines the timeline. Whenever new material surfaces connecting Trump to the Epstein files, fresh documents, flight logs, or witness testimony implicating powerful men in the sexual abuse and torture of children, the news cycle conveniently fills with explosions. The pattern has become so reliable that it scarcely requires elaboration. A political war, then, fought as distraction. A racist and religious war, in which an entire nation of 90 million people is reduced by its attackers to a single, dehumanised caricature.
Trump has described Iranians as among "the most evil people ever on earth," a statement of breathtaking historical ignorance and moral vacancy from a man who has spent years cultivating relationships with some of the most genuinely evil figures of modern times.
From the moment Operation Epic Fury was launched, Trump's messaging has oscillated between outright fabrication, dealmaking and the wholesale destruction of Iran. He has called on the IRGC to surrender in exchange for immunity. He has asked Iranian diplomats to switch sides. He has declared that the new Supreme Leader will "not last long" without American approval. These are not the utterances of a statesman prosecuting a considered strategy. They are the improvisations of a man who began a war without a plan to end it, and who is now making his endgame up as the west loses allies and the body count climbs.
OMG a reporter confronts Donald Trump about Iran bombed its own elementary school with an American Tomahawk missile ridiciliously 😂🤣😠pic.twitter.com/k7ld66Xk9W
— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) March 9, 2026
New Zealand cannot afford to observe this catastrophe with the polite detachment of a small nation that prefers not to make a fuss. The economic consequences of a destabilised Middle East, surging oil prices, disrupted shipping lanes, and rattled global markets, land here with the same weight as anywhere. But beyond the economic, there is a moral obligation that this country has historically been willing to honour. We have a tradition of independent foreign policy that this moment demands we exercise again. But sadly our current spineless leadership is so vacuous as to appear like they're in support of Trump and Netanyahu's illegal war of annihilation.
Every missile that falls on a school, every village left without clean water, every use of illegal weapons, every civilian death that Trump waves away with a fresh denunciation of people he knows nothing about, each of these is a brick in the wall of resentment that will define how the world regards complicit Western nations for decades to come. History is not made only by those who pull triggers. It is also made by those who stay silent while the triggers are being pulled.
This is the dumbest kind of war: illegal, unjustified, racist, politically motivated, and conducted by a man who cannot name the school or desalination plant he has just ordered destroyed. New Zealand should oppose this war. Our politicians should say so, clearly and without any apology.
