On February 28, US forces struck a girls’ primary school in Minab, in Iran’s Hormozgan province. The building was hit three times, killing 180 people, most of them girls aged seven to 12. That plain fact must not be softened by the operational language that has dominated official briefings: “degraded capabilities,” “targets serviced,” and “mission success.” These were innocent civilian lives — the very lives the laws of war exist to protect.
Not long after, a US submarine fired a torpedo that sank the IRIS Dena, a frigate returning from India’s Milan 2026 exercise while in international waters. The attack, celebrated by a public figure styling himself “Secretary of War,” killed 87 sailors who were not engaged as combatants when the torpedo struck. The rhetoric surrounding these incidents — celebrating kills, rebranding war offices, describing naval losses as a “quiet death” — signals a mindset in which force is valorized over legal or moral constraint.
There is an older, more demanding framework for judging when and how force may be used. Systematized in Western thought by Saint Augustine and later by Thomas Aquinas, just war theory distinguishes jus ad bellum (when it is just to go to war) from jus in bello (how to fight justly). After 1945 these norms were secularized into international law: Nuremberg established individual liability for aggressive war; the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I enshrine discrimination (distinguishing combatants from civilians) and proportionality (forbidding attacks causing civilian harm grossly disproportionate to the anticipated military advantage). Deliberate attacks on civilians and disproportionate attacks are not moral suggestions; they are legal prohibitions the United States has signed.
The current campaign fails both branches of that test. On jus ad bellum, the administration never presented a convincing intelligence case that Iran posed an imminent threat. Multiple assessments, including from Western intelligence and arms-control analysts, found no evidence of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program or an imminent restart. Diplomacy appeared to be moving forward: Oman’s foreign minister, who mediated talks between Washington and Tehran, said negotiations were close to a breakthrough when the strikes began. British sources reported that channels had not been exhausted. Yet forces were positioned and strikes launched while talks were still formally ongoing — a show of preparation masquerading as a last resort. Even deeply contested precedents for unilateral action historically involved extended coalition building or at least formal UN processes; that restraint has now been abandoned.
On jus in bello, Minab and the Dena are emblematic failures. In Minab the administration initially sought to obscure responsibility. Early claims that Iran had bombed its own school required implausible explanations — for example, suggesting Iran fired Tomahawk cruise missiles, weapons the US supplies and fields. When evidence mounted, a Pentagon inquiry and independent investigations by major outlets concluded a US missile struck the site; video evidence authenticated a Tomahawk impact. The posture of confusion and obfuscation that followed these revelations was not mere bureaucratic slippage but a reflexive attempt to avoid accountability.
The sinking of the Dena evokes morally fraught precedent. Its defenders invoked the 1982 sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, itself long regarded as a dark episode: the Belgrano was torpedoed while sailing away from the exclusion zone, killing hundreds and staining the Falklands campaign. The Dena, likewise, was returning from exercise in international waters when struck without warning. To treat such an attack as a meritorious achievement rather than a potentially unlawful killing of seafarers is to abandon the discrimination and proportionality that jus in bello requires.
Just war theory asks not whether operations are militarily effective but whether they are right. A school full of children and a frigate sailing home from exercise are not legitimate military targets. Their destruction is not the kind of tragic collateral loss the laws of war acknowledge; it is evidence of willful disregard for the basic distinction between combatant and noncombatant and for the obligation to weigh civilian harm against military advantage.
The legal architecture that constrains state behavior is, in the end, a system of voluntary restraint. There is no global sovereign that can enforce compliance beyond political, economic, and reputational costs, nor beyond the prospect of criminal accountability where it can be pursued. International law operates because states — especially powerful ones — choose to be bound by it. When the most powerful state opts out, or treats its own violations as administratively manageable rather than criminally culpable, it does more than break rules: it corrodes the norms that sustain a rules-based order. Other states take cues from impunity and recalibrate their own thresholds for force; the protective canopy the law offers to civilians begins to fray.
These decisions have human as well as geopolitical consequences. The calculus that treats civilians as acceptable risks in pursuit of strategic messaging or demonstrable force erodes the moral frameworks that separate legitimate self-defense from aggression and lawfulness from lawlessness. If “quiet deaths” are applauded and explanations obfuscated, international law and the moral claims behind it will not long constrain anyone.
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
