The Times editorial, surveying this reality, informs its readers that the regime deserves no sympathy. Had Iran launched a comparable preemptive strike on Washington—killing the president, his officials and family members during active negotiations, while simultaneously killing over 100 American children—the Times and the entire political establishment would have responded with a fury that would have made the reaction to September 11 appear measured. The demand for accountability would have admitted no qualification.

The Iranian dead receive none of this. The children among them are unacknowledged. The widows of assassinated officials generate no moral consideration. The “no sympathy” formulation erases them from the moral universe within which the editorial’s readers are invited to evaluate the war—a universe in which Iranian lives constitute a categorically different order of existence from American lives, one that imposes no obligations of acknowledgment or accountability on those who have taken them. This is not incidental to the editorial’s politics. It is their moral foundation, designed to ensure that Phase Two can be organized and prosecuted with the same indifference to Iranian human life that characterized Phase One.