Was Striking Iran the Right Call? The Case For and the Case Against.

On December 28, 2025, Iranians took to the streets in the largest uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The trigger was economic collapse — the rial in freefall, inflation running at catastrophic levels, sanctions biting deeper than ever before. Within days, the protests had spread to every major city.

On January 8 and 9, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered security forces to open fire with live ammunition on the crowds. The documented death toll — verified by name, case by case, by human rights organisations — stands at approximately 7,000. Senior Iranian health ministry officials who subsequently briefed the Trump administration put the figure at around 30,000. Iran International, one of the most credible independent Iran-focused outlets, estimates 36,500. The Iranian government acknowledges 3,117. The true number remains contested and unverifiable, but the scale of what happened is not: this was a massacre. The New York Times called it the largest state killing of civilians in "many decades."

On February 26, US and Iranian negotiators were still talking.

On February 28, the bombs dropped.

Operation Epic Fury — coordinated US-Israel strikes across Iran — killed Khamenei on day one, targeted missile sites, military infrastructure, and nuclear facilities, and stated regime change as an explicit objective. Around 2,000 strikes in 48 hours. Iran retaliated across the Persian Gulf.

Was this justice served on one of the world's most brutal regimes, at a moment when the window to stop a nuclear threat was closing? Or did the United States and Israel just discard diplomacy, kill a head of state, and open a regional war — two days after their own negotiators walked out of productive talks?

The Case That the Strike Was Justified

There is a version of this argument that doesn't require you to be a hawk. It requires you to look at what the Iranian regime did, and what it was building.

• The regime massacred its own people on a scale the world has not seen in decades. By any estimate — even the Iranian government's own — thousands of citizens were shot dead in the streets for protesting economic misery. At the upper range supported by senior Iranian officials, the figure approaches 30,000 in the span of days. This was not collateral damage. It was policy: Khamenei's explicit order to use lethal force to protect his government. A regime that massacres tens of thousands of its own citizens in January and then sits down at a nuclear negotiating table in February has not changed — it has bought time. The moral weight of what happened in January cannot be separated from the question of what to do in February.
• Iran was not operating a civilian nuclear programme. At the time of the strikes, Iran had enriched uranium to 60% purity — weapons-grade is 90%, but 60% is not a civilian energy figure. It is a weapons-programme figure. The JCPOA had capped enrichment at 3.67%. Iran had blown past that limit years ago and accelerated since. The IAEA had been denied access to key sites. The intelligence assessment across multiple Western governments was consistent: Iran was months, not years, from a nuclear weapon.
• Iran's demands in the talks were non-negotiable and designed to fail. Iranian negotiators refused to discuss their ballistic missile programme. They refused to discuss support for Hamas and Hezbollah. They refused to commit to destroying key enrichment facilities. What they offered was a temporary suspension of enrichment — a pause, not a dismantlement. The same offer, made and broken, multiple times before. Talks that can only produce a pause are not diplomacy. They are delay.
• The proxies Iran funded killed thousands. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Iraqi militias have between them killed Israeli civilians, destabilised Lebanon, attacked international shipping, and killed American soldiers. Iran supplied the weapons, the money, and the strategic direction. A government that sponsors terrorism across a region while negotiating a nuclear agreement is not a good-faith partner. It is running two tracks simultaneously.
• "More time" had been tried. The Obama administration negotiated the JCPOA in 2015. Iran enriched anyway. Trump withdrew in 2018. Negotiations resumed under Biden, failed, resumed again, failed again. By 2026, Iran had been "two years from a bomb" for over a decade — and the gap was finally, genuinely closing. At some point, the argument that diplomacy needs more time becomes the argument that the bomb should be allowed to exist.
• Regime change was not a side effect — it was the point. The same regime that murdered 30,000 of its own people in January was the regime running the nuclear programme. You cannot separate the human rights question from the security question. Destroying the nuclear programme while leaving the regime intact was always a temporary solution. The strikes addressed both simultaneously.

The Case That This Was the Wrong Call

But here is what the architects of Operation Epic Fury do not want to reckon with.

• Talks were ongoing two days before the bombs dropped. On February 26, US and Iranian negotiators concluded what was described, even by sceptical observers, as the "most intense" round of nuclear talks yet. Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi had tabled proposals for a multi-year suspension of enrichment. That is not a regime refusing to engage. That is a regime making concessions — imperfect ones, insufficient ones, but concessions. Walking out of those talks on Friday and dropping 2,000 bombs on Sunday is not a negotiating tactic. It is the abandonment of negotiation.
• Killing a head of state is not a military operation. It is an assassination. Whatever Khamenei's crimes — and they were enormous — the deliberate targeting and killing of a sovereign nation's head of state is an act of war without precedent in modern international law, conducted without a UN Security Council mandate, without a formal declaration of war, and without congressional authorisation. If this is legitimate, so is any state assassinating any leader it designates as a threat. The precedent set here will not be confined to Iran.
• The nuclear sites were not successfully destroyed. Two days after the strikes began, the IAEA confirmed it had no evidence that any nuclear installation had been hit or damaged. Iran's nuclear knowledge cannot be bombed out of existence — the scientists, the expertise, the documentation exist independently of the physical infrastructure. The strikes may have delayed the programme. They did not end it. If the justification for the operation was the nuclear threat, that justification has not been achieved.
• "Regime change" without a plan is just destruction. The US stated publicly that the objective was to topple the Islamic Republic. It has no plan for what comes next. The parallel with 2003 Iraq is imperfect but instructive: the United States removed a brutal dictator, had no post-war strategy, and created a power vacuum that destabilised the region for two decades. Iran is three times the size of Iraq and three times as complex. Toppling the regime without a credible transition framework is not liberation. It is chaos dressed up as policy.
• Iran's retaliation is already killing people in countries that did not choose this war. US military bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have all been hit. Three Americans are already dead. Gulf states that host US infrastructure did not vote for this operation — they are now targets because of it. The regional consequences of the decision made in Washington and Tel Aviv are being paid by populations who had no say in it.
• The death toll of the January massacres does not justify this response. This argument is the most difficult one — because it requires separating genuine moral outrage from strategic justification. The Iranian regime's massacre of its own citizens was a crime against humanity. But the people killed in January and the nuclear programme are distinct issues. Using the massacres as moral cover for a strategic military decision conflates two things that must be evaluated separately. If the standard for military intervention is "the regime kills its own people," there are dozens of candidates ahead of Iran in the queue.

What Nobody Will Say Out Loud

Here's the truth both sides are avoiding:

The pro-strike side won't admit that the nuclear sites were not successfully destroyed — the primary stated justification for the operation has not been achieved. And that 2,000 strikes that kill a supreme leader, destroy military infrastructure, and state regime change as an objective, while leaving the nuclear programme intact, is not a surgical counter-proliferation operation. It is a war.

The anti-strike side won't admit that the regime they want to protect through continued diplomacy just slaughtered its own citizens in numbers that dwarf most modern conflicts. "More talks" with a government that massacred up to 30,000 people in January, enriched uranium to 60% in February, and funded active terrorist proxies simultaneously is not a moral position. It is a procedural one. And procedure has limits.

The real question — the one neither side wants to answer — is: at what point does a regime's behaviour disqualify it from the diplomatic protections that international law extends to states? And who gets to decide?

Why This Debate Needs to Happen Now

The decisions made in the last 72 hours will define the Middle East — and potentially global security — for a generation. They are being made by governments, but their consequences will be lived by millions of ordinary people in Iran, in Israel, in the Gulf states, and wherever the shockwaves travel.

The "debate" is currently happening on cable news, in UN Security Council chambers where Russia and China will veto everything, and in social media threads where complexity is the first casualty.

This needs a real confrontation. One where an international law scholar has to answer for what "diplomacy" means when a government is actively massacring its population. And where a military strategist has to answer for why regime change was the stated objective before a single nuclear site was confirmed destroyed.

That's what deb8tly is built for.

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