It is, unfortunately, the wrong question.
During the 2003 Iraq War, then–Major General David Petraeus famously said to the journalist and historian Rick Atkinson, “Tell me how this ends.” It is the obvious query to be posed about the conflict with Iran, but it requires a different answer.
In the middle of a war, few people are inclined to take the longest view of its origins. The implications of the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina, in 1908, were probably of little interest to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, or General John J. Pershing in 1917. But the questions of when and why a war began are essential to understanding it.
In the case of the Iran war, we must see the conflict not as a war unto itself but rather as the latest campaign in a war that has gone on since the 1979 Iranian revolution, conducted for the most part with covert warfare, naval skirmishes, and raids. The launch of Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025, in which the U.S. targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, marked a new phase. The war has been fought by the United States, Israel, and most of the Persian Gulf’s Sunni monarchies against a regime that combines an unappeasable anti-Western ideology and exterminationist hatred of Israel with a desire to assert old Persian imperial reach.
