So here’s the uncomfortable question Australians should ask, especially when our leader Anthony Albanese was so quick to line up behind the strikes: what exactly is the theory of change?
Not the slogan. Not the press release. The real theory. How, precisely, does dropping bombs - or killing a dictator - make Iranian women freer, Iranian prisons emptier, Iranian courts fairer, or Iranian politics more accountable? And how does it secure long-term peace in the Middle East.
If we can’t answer that in plain language, then we are not looking at a pathway to peace and human rights. We’re looking at protracted violence and dysfunction dressed up as virtue.
That is way too reductive, and ultimately incorrect.
Bombing Germany and Japan may have decimated their respective armies and leadership, but it was the decades-long boots on the ground occupation and rebuilding that ensured those countries were able to develop into democracies.
Given our (collective Western) failures to do so in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t hold high hopes for the future of Iran - despite how much I wish for its people to be able to return to the freedoms they had for a brief period under Mosaddegh in the early ‘50s.