US and Iran Exchange Strikes Targeting Military and Civilian Infrastructure
Bombing Bridges Is Not Government, It Is Usurpation
When rulers rain fire on civilians and call it security, they step out of civil government and into a state of war with the people they claim to protect.
American forces, we are told, have struck bridges, a railway station, a civilian airport building, and electricity infrastructure in southern Iran, producing power cuts and damaged transport, while a girls’ elementary school was destroyed in an earlier “double‑tap” strike that killed at least 150 persons, most of them children and staff, with a hospital rendered inoperable and its patients driven out. Iranian officials now report 38 dead and over 400 wounded in a single week. The American command declares these attacks aim “to further degrade Iranian military capabilities,” and a former American ruler had spoken openly of bombing civilian infrastructure. I begin, as I did in my Second Treatise, with a plain question: what sort of power over men could any free and equal people ever consent to here?
To understand political power, I once wrote, we must first consider men in the state of nature, where they are under “a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one,” and that law, which is reason, teaches that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” I paraphrase my own words, because they bear repeating. Civil government is justified only so far as it better secures those very goods by settled rules and impartial judges. It may punish aggressors; it may wage war against those who persist in violence; but it may never claim a right directly to target the lives and livelihoods of innocents as a means to frighten or weaken their rulers. The moment it does so, it sinks beneath the law of nature, instead of rising above it.
Here the facts offered show bridges broken, electricity cut, airports and a railway station struck, a school obliterated, a hospital disabled, and a blockade of ports undertaken, all within a wider exchange of missiles and drones. The United States says this is to pressure Iran and degrade its military; Iran responds by closing the Strait of Hormuz, launching missiles and drones at neighbouring states and at American aircraft, and striking in Iraqi Kurdistan, where at least eight opposition fighters were killed. The sea lane closure and attacks on bases and fighters may raise other questions; yet my concern is narrower and more fundamental. What possible public good can justify destroying a school full of children or a hospital full of patients, or knocking out power for whole provinces, as a means of policy?
In my account of prerogative, I allowed that the executive sometimes must act without, or even against, standing rules, where the public safety manifestly requires it and the remedy cannot wait upon the legislative. But I made that power a trust, always revocable, and always judged by one standard: do the people plainly see their lives, liberties, and estates better secured, or do they see themselves exposed to an arbitrary will? When attacks fall, night after night, upon civilian bridges and power stations, when schools and hospitals are ruined and whole regions sit in the dark, the discretion claimed ceases to look like emergency care and begins to look like a long train of abuses tending one way. Prerogative that entrenches conflict rather than shortening it is no longer prerogative. It is tyranny in the making.
Nor will it serve to say that such civilian objects are “dual‑use,” or that weakening them weakens the opposing state, and so in a roundabout manner serves the public good of the attacking nation. All power in civil society is held on trust for persons as the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world to preserve themselves and one another. No people could ever be supposed to consent to a government that reserves to itself a right to bury their children under rubble or leave their sick to perish for want of power or care, merely because some enemy’s forces may thereby be inconvenienced. A ruler who claims such a right sets himself up as judge in his own case against the law of nature, and that is the very definition of arbitrary power.
Iran, for its part, has also launched missiles and drones at its Gulf neighbours and at American bases; it has closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for new American strikes after its own forces attacked a merchant vessel. When both sides strike beyond combatants, hinder neutral commerce, and endanger third countries, they cease to behave as governments in a society of nations and revert, in effect, to the state of nature with one another. Yet even there the law of nature binds. The wrong of one party does not license every excess in the other. In war, as in peace, the obligation not to harm the innocent in their life, health, liberty, or possessions never sleeps.
What then follows for the people under such bombardments and blockades? In the Second Treatise I argued that “whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,” they thereby put themselves into a state of war with the people and dissolve the trust on which government rests; I paraphrase, but the sense is exact. If a government, under colour of security, repeatedly wages war on its own subjects’ lives and subsistence, it invites resistance and replacement. So too when a foreign power acts by naked force on a population that never consented to its rule. Those who suffer such usurpations are justified in seeking a new political settlement that will honestly secure, rather than casually sacrifice, their natural rights.
Yet I must end with a caution I pressed before: every private grievance does not warrant revolution, nor does every single outrage suffice to dissolve governments and treaties. The evidence before me is grave, but also incomplete; whether what we now see forms a truly “long train of abuses” pointing one way is for those who live under it to judge, with a steady eye to the misery of civil war and the duty, if they resist, to found something better than what they cast off. What I can say without hesitation is this: bombing bridges, schools, and hospitals is not an exercise of rightful government, but an appeal to heaven written in fire over the heads of the innocent.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The law of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.