I just watched a 2024 Finnish mini-series Conflict. Wikipedia says: “The series imagines a scenario where an unidentified enemy invades Hankoniemi during midsummer celebrations, and follows the resulting conflict through the lens of the country’s leadership and among those who remain in Hanko on the occupied territory.”
The hybrid forces invading Finland reminded me of not just Russia, but also of Iran acting through its proxies. While I was watching, I felt such hatred for the masked bad guys. I wanted to kill all the mercenary invaders of this noble nation.
We rarely can command others, but we often can influence them, and to the extent we can influence them, we may share some responsibility for their choices.
This Washington Post essay makes concrete and logical the raw rage I feel about Iran’s regime:
U.S. military action in Iran is justified because of longstanding armed conflict…
This campaign continues an ongoing and long-term armed conflict with Iran…
There are strong arguments that the conflict has been ongoing for the 47 years since the Iranian Revolution. Unquestionably, this armed conflict has persisted over the past several years. That the U.S. has historically chosen to tolerate acts of Iranian aggression or respond in limited ways in no way negates the reality of this conflict.
Before the current hostilities, Iran’s most recent actions against the U.S. occurred on Feb. 3, when an Iranian drone “aggressively approached” and was shot down by a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. Hours later, two gunboats operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to seize a U.S.-flagged tanker in international waters.
According to a 2024 report by Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, between October 2023 and November 2024, “the Iranian military helped facilitate” at least 190 attacks against U.S. military forces by Iranian-aligned militants. During 2025, the Iranian-backed Houthis repeatedly attacked U.S. naval ships in the Red Sea. Also in 2025, Iranian proxies attacked U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria.
During the same period, Iran brought its “shadow war” to U.S. soil. The Biden and Trump justice departments have documented Iranian plots to assassinate Trump, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former national security adviser John Bolton and Iranian American women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad.
Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iran has been held responsible for the deaths of 603 U.S. troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, 241 service members in the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, three soldiers in Jordan in January 2024 and dozens of U.S. civilians.
The Talmud says “shlucho shel adam k’moto,” which means “a person’s agent is like the person himself.” In Jewish law, when someone appoints an agent to act on his behalf, the legal consequences attach to the principal as if he personally performed the act. American law contains almost the same rule through agency doctrine. Acts of an authorized agent are legally the acts of the principal. If the agent acts within the scope of authority, the principal bears responsibility.
The Restatement of Agency states that a principal is bound by the acts of an agent acting with actual or apparent authority. Contracts signed by the agent bind the principal. Torts committed by an employee in the course of employment bind the employer. A corporation only acts through agents, so when a CEO signs a contract or an employee makes a representation within their authority, the law treats the corporation as the actor. Conspiracy and accomplice liability extend this logic further: a person who directs another to commit a crime can be treated as having committed it himself.
States face similar rules. The International Court of Justice treats proxy forces or militias as attributable to a state if that state directs or substantially controls them. The framework appears in the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility.
That logic applies to geopolitics. Iran does not always attack the United States directly. It acts through Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and other proxies. The argument is that those actors function as Iran’s agents. If their attacks are attributable to Tehran, they count legally as Iranian attacks. Once that premise holds, the rest of the argument follows.
First premise: Iran and the United States are already in an ongoing armed conflict because Iranian proxies have repeatedly attacked U.S. forces and allies. Second premise: in an ongoing armed conflict, each strike does not require a fresh imminence justification. Once the right of self-defense is triggered, operations can continue until the enemy’s capacity or intent to attack is neutralized. Conclusion: the current U.S. strikes are not a new war of choice but a continuation of an existing armed conflict.
This reframes the political debate entirely. Critics ask whether Trump just started a war. Corn and Kittrie ask whether the war already existed. If it did, the legal bar for action drops significantly.
The deeper fight is not really legal. It is narrative. The phrase “war of choice” was built during the Iraq debate and implies a war the United States chose to start unnecessarily. The authors try to invert that by arguing Iran created the conflict through years of proxy attacks. The whole argument rests on treating Iran’s proxies as its legal agents. Reject that premise and the argument collapses. Accept it and the logic runs straight through.
A friend says:
When holding Iran responsible for the actions of its proxies, don’t forget that Israel has acted through proxies as well. It supported the South Lebanon Army (Christian Falangists) and then stood by without attempting to stop it when it went on a rampage in the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. My understanding is that Israel helped set up Hamas as a proxy to be a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. Israel has armed and trained Kurds involved in separatist movements in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
