So if you follow the mainstream American media response to the US's attack on Iran, a lot of it is framed in what you might call consequentialist terms. The big focus is, how much did the US destroy these Iranian nuclear facilities? And then, what are the Iranians going to do in response?
So the implication is if the US destroyed a lot of these, and Iran doesn't do too much in response, then this was good. But maybe it won't be good if they didn't destroy so much of the nuclear facilities, and Iran kills a bunch of US soldiers. And I just want to suggest that I think that's fundamentally the wrong way to think about something like this, that it's really, really myopic. And I actually think it's also just immoral to think only in these terms.
I mean, I could make an argument that in consequentialist terms, that this is a really big mistake, right? Because I could say the US had a nuclear deal that would have prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for quite a long time, so you didn't need to do this. And beyond that, that US troops are very vulnerable, particularly in Iraq, where the pro-Iranian militias are very, very tied into the Iraqi military. So I could make a consequentialist argument.
But in some ways I just think, actually, even that concedes too much. That's actually, just fundamentally, the wrong discourse to be involved in. And the reason is, first of all, because I think that this consequentialist discourse just has way too limited a framework in terms of time horizon.
