Ian Sykes ’28
Opinions Editor
This is Israel’s war and Americans are dying for it.
On Feb. 28, 2026, Israel struck Iran and coerced the United States to do the same, culminating in the death of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the beginning of “Operation Epic Fury,” otherwise known as yet another war that Israel has dragged us into, and that Americans will invariably die in. While Trump once alleged that this war was directed to free the suppressed people of Iran and prevent their acquisition of a nuclear weapon, any false pretenses have since been lost.
For the first excuse, we just mistakenly bombed 175 Iranian schoolgirls, and I think that is self-explanatory. For the second, Trump pulled out of the existing nuclear deal which merits a larger article but was generally favorable and also negotiated by the entire UN Security Council. So, to allege that this war is “for the people” or to decapitate Iran’s nuclear program (even though Trump said that it “obliterated” their nuclear facilities, and that anything else is fake news) is false. The answer is thus: this war is for Israel.
A country hellbent on eliminating Iran at all costs, Israel struck Iran and we acquiesced by helping them, even though this is their problem. If you aren’t convinced that Israel controls the United States, please consider AIPAC. This deserves another article too, but need I say more? They own our politicians and therefore our country — even Netanyahu agrees that we are easily controlled. This war is theirs but we are dying in it.
Even worse, it is seemingly pointless. While Iran is a dubious country, they have every reason to think the same of the US. We refuse to respect their sovereignty, so why would they respect ours? For a crisis that to the US seems like yet another endless and unsurprising conflict in the Middle East, to Iran this war is an existential threat. Yet, Iran posed no imminent threat to us even according to the Pentagon themselves. Considering that Trump has said that this war will continue until he receives unconditional surrender, this war will be another indefinite one where Americans will die needlessly as we have no reason to expect the Iranians to surrender to us (an existential threat.) In some sense, we started this conflict by overthrowing their democratically-elected leader and supplanting him with our oil peon decades ago, so they have every reason to be angry—yet they didn’t pose an imminent threat. Hell, to play devil’s advocate, if we are allowed to proclaim that fighting wars like these is a divine right from God, why should we disallow them from doing the same with their religion? Obviously, both are horrible ideas, but as it pertains to moral righteousness, we have none. Wouldn’t it be best if we took our hands off of the Middle East for a change?
Even though he and Trump ran as the “peace ticket,” let me remind you that JD Vance once said “when people like Kamala Harris send our sons and daughters, our young people, to fight in stupid wars, it is the young generation that carries the burden of that. We’re gonna stop sending our young people to far away lands.” Are we though, Mr. Vance? In notorious American fashion, young people are being sent off to die in meaningless conflicts once again. The youngest American who has died thus far, Declan Cody, was 20 years old, making him not much younger nor older than any of us. The war hawks among us must realize that this is who we are sacrificing when “strategic goals”: our peers. Even worse is that we are sacrificing them for Israel, a country which treats us like trash and uses our soldiers as disposable to their ends.
Actually, perhaps this war is better called Epstein’s War, considering that it has been a great distraction at a time where focus on Trump’s connections with renowned pedophile and child rapist Jeffrey Epstein is decidedly high. But I digress. No one wants to die for the Epstein class, nor Netanyahu, nor Trump, who dodged the draft. This carnage needs to end, and the US government needs to start answering to its people — not to Israel.
Featured image courtesy of CNN
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