Operation Epic Fury: A Civilizational Fail

Aeschylus had a warning for the Trump administration

Since President Trump launched the war against Iran almost a month ago, I have struggled to respond using the language of Loyal Opposition.

I might have decried the decision to launch a war without congressional authorization. But let’s be honest: Congress has been debating whether to authorize military action in Iran since June and taken no action. On Jan. 23, Trump announced that he was sending an “armada” toward Iran. On Jan. 26, The USS Abraham Lincoln and its carrier strike group arrived in the Middle East. Congress had plenty of opportunity to exercise its authorities and chose not to. Every person who chants “No Kings!” should follow that with “Save Congress.” A Congress that brings a consequential debate to conclusion and decision in a timely fashion is the only answer to a president who operates as king.

And sometimes, the place to point the finger is at Congress, not the president. This is one of those times.

I do decry the remarkable underestimation of the Iranian nation. In the 1990s, I worked for an Iranian documentary filmmaker who was narrating the story of pro-democracy women writers and artists in Iran. I spent hours watching her raw footage from bustling Tehran, ancient Isfahan, and beautiful mountains, plains and valleys. In one especially powerful stretch of footage, throngs of bare-chested young men marched through Iranian streets to commemorate the Battle of Karbala, a founding event for Shia Islam. As they marched in a ritual of mourning for a martyr, the young men beat their own backs with short leather thongs. I had never seen such intense commitment.

That Iran is home to a long-lived and impressive civilization is clear. That its modern regime also posed a substantial danger to global peace — and its own people, so many of whom were killed in January simply for assembling to express their grievances with their government — is equally clear. Finding the path forward between those two facts has been a generational challenge for American presidents.

What has disturbed me most of all, though, is how we are fighting this war: Operation Epic Fury. In ancient Greece, the mythical Furies terrified people, not because anger itself is scary (though it is), but because when the Furies appeared, they inevitably unleashed cycles of vendetta that were exceptionally hard to end. Revenge begets revenge.

One of the most important trilogies in ancient Greek drama, the Oresteia, reaches its climax in the conversion of the Furies into the Eumenides, or the “well-minded ones,” who successfully replace a culture of revenge with stable and bounded practices of justice. That idea is foundational to Greek culture and therefore for the Western civilization that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claims to defend.

The entire purpose of civilization, the playwright Aeschylus argues, is to redirect the Furies toward productive pursuits. Civilizing humanity requires taming them. To unleash them is to choose to undo civilization.

Two recent essays have captured my concern about the failure of the Trump administration to appreciate what it means to protect civilization — meaning peaceful, cooperative social organization. One is by Iraq War veteran and novelist Phil Klay and one comes from Iranian-American author and scholar of religion Reza Aslan.

Both writers reflect on how civilization can be preserved even under the exigencies of war, even under the necessity for realpolitik.

As Klay writes: “If war is politics by other means, and if all government rests on opinion, as the Federalist Papers suggest, then the ultimate outcome of wars is going to be a matter not simply of military successes but also of the long-term effect of the use of violence on the warring populations.” He invokes Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who “told Americans we must arm our allies in Europe to prevent: ‘A new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.’”

A world run by threats of brute force is precisely what the Trump administration is giving us, by their own admission, if we take Stephen Miller at his word.

Notice that Klay is worried about the effects of that world of brute force on “warring populations,” plural. Danger lurks not only for the Iranians, but also for us. Shift the frame for a moment and consider the case of Israel and the Palestinians. When one reads about the brutal violence against Palestinians committed by Israeli settlers, it is hard not to see the long-term effect of the use of violence on warring populations, on both sides.

How can we take the project of civilization seriously during wartime? The word “civilization” is for starters desperately out of fashion. Perhaps it’s easier to use if we understand it simply as referring to a collective capacity to resist the temptation to descend to the level of the Furies.

Aslan writes that for decades, as he has written and spoken about Iran and tried “to explain its history, culture and politics to American audiences,” he has consistently made the case for “engagement, diplomacy, cultural exchange and economic ties that open the country to the world, giving the United States both leverage and responsibility in shaping the regime’s behavior.” This approach, Aslan argues, would be the best way to help Iranians fight authoritarianism.

In other words, his advice has been: Reinforce the powers of civilization. Drive the cause of civilization itself forward.

A mistake people make about the American Revolution is to think that first the Americans fought a war and toppled a government, and then they figured out what to build. In fact, the reverse is true. The colonies began writing constitutions to turn themselves into states in January of 1776. By July 4, 1776, five colonies had already done this work. In other words, the purpose of war was not so much to destroy but to carry forward a project of civilization — a commitment to stable institutions designed to support the safety and happiness of a people.

The end is in the beginning, and the beginning in the end. If the goal is peace, and civilization, then the beginning should carry those seeds. Operation Epic Fury, with its name and approach to warfare, promises the ongoing degradation of human civilization. This is a great danger to all of us, even if the war somewhat reduces the specific near-term threat from Iran.

As Klay puts it, “Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.” These are wise words. The voice, I think, of the Loyal Opposition.

I’m delighted to share that Phil Klay will join me for the next episode of the Headstrong Club, our Last Wednesdays Substack Live, this Wednesday, March 25, at 2:15 pm. Don’t miss it!