As Donald Trump considers a U.S. war with Iran and the Pentagon builds up military forces in the Middle East, I find myself returning, oddly, to a question posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How many men are necessary to change a crime into a virtue?” He wondered this in his 1894 treatise on Christian nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within You, paraphrasing a pamphlet by Christian anarchist and abolitionist Adin Ballou: “One man may not kill. As Murtaza Hussain wrote in The Intercept in 2021, “In place of a diplomatic arrangement, the Trump administration waged a campaign of economic pressure, sabotage, and assassinations targeting Iranian leadership.” But unlike the 2015 nuclear deal, these tactics failed to actually curb Iran’s nuclear program, which has continued to advance in the ensuing years, even as U.S. sanctions cause great humanitarian harm. Earlier this month, Schumer attacked the president for “folding” on nuclear talks; in February, Jeffries told reporters, “We can’t take our foot off the gas pedal until Iran is brought to its knees.” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), meanwhile, has explicitly called on the U.S. to escalate its involvement, writing that Israel should “keep wiping out Iranian leadership” and the U.S. “must provide whatever is necessary — military, intelligence, weaponry — to fully back Israel in striking Iran.”
Author: Schuyler Mitchell
Published at: 2025-06-18 21:29:48
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