by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
For centuries, modern nations had generally conducted their wars in rather gentlemanly fashion, usually making efforts to comply with all the laws and international treaties regulating such conflicts.
A war might often begin with a downcast ambassador delivering a diplomatic note to the accredited government, informing its political leadership that unless certain crucial demands were immediately met, a state of war should be assumed to exist by noon the following day. After performing that doleful duty, the diplomat and his staff would return to their embassy, pack their bags, burn their secret documents, and take the next train to the frontier.
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Even Japan’s infamous December 7, 1941 surprise attack at Pearl Harbor had supposedly been intended to preserve all these legalistic niceties. From what I’ve read, the Japanese ambassador and his aides had been instructed to personally hand-deliver a declaration of war to our president perhaps five or ten minutes before their country’s planes were scheduled to begin dropping their bombs on our anchored fleet at the other side of the world, thereby complying with the letter of international law though massively violating its spirit. But delays in decoding diplomatic instructions or other such accidental errors led to a snafu in which the military attack actually came before the official declaration of war that legally enabled it, resulting in a lasting legacy of hard feelings between our two countries.
However, America has always prided itself on its innovations, and in recent years we have applied this approach to the initiation of military conflicts, following the lead of our Israeli mentors in that regard. A perfect example came in how we began our current war against Iran.
Iran was extremely eager to avert such a military conflict, so just as in the past we successfully lured them into several rounds of lengthy peace negotiations with the personal envoys of President Donald Trump.
According to media reports, considerable progress had been made in the talks, and the Iranians had already agreed to many of our demands. They were considering doing so on others as well, making greater concessions than anyone had originally expected. The negotiations therefore adjourned for a couple of days, and were scheduled to resume on the following Monday.
The Iranians naturally had to think long and hard before agreeing to all our terms. Therefore, they held a full meeting of their top leadership to decide whether to do so.
But prompting the Iranians to hold such a high-level meeting had apparently been the underlying goal of our entire negotiating strategy. As the New York Times reported the next day, with so many of Iran’s leaders thus gathered together in one place, they were all killed by an Israeli missile strike, an attack that essentially constituted our official declaration of war:
Israel, using U.S. intelligence and its own, would execute an operation it had been planning for months: the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leaders.
The United States and Israeli governments, which had originally planned to launch a strike at night under the cover of darkness, made the decision to adjust the timing to take advantage of the information about the gathering at the government compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.
The leaders were set to meet where the offices of the Iranian presidency, the supreme leader and Iran’s National Security Council are located.
Israel had determined that the gathering would include top Iranian defense officials, including Mohammad Pakpour, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; Aziz Nasirzadeh, the minister of defense; Adm. Ali Shamkhani, the head of the Military Council; Seyyed Majid Mousavi, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force; Mohammad Shirazi, the deputy intelligence minister; and others.
That same Times article published a helpful chart showing just how much of Iran’s top military and national security leadership had been eliminated in that sudden, unexpected missile attack.
