Days after the Republicans’ disastrous midterm defeat, Representative Thomas Massie announced that he would reintroduce his articles of impeachment against War Secretary Pete Hegseth as soon as Congress reconvenes next week.
He says only one thing could stop him: Hegseth’s resignation. Massie’s previous attempt, in September, was thwarted when House Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers home early rather than allow a vote. In Washington, this is a story about politics and a government job.
In southern Iran, however, it is a story of stolen lives, normalized injustice, and thousands of families left to grapple with unimaginable grief and unanswered questions about accountability.
A mother sits beneath a tree her daughter loved, weeping for dreams that now survive only in memory. A father makes the daily journey to the graveyard to read bedtime stories to his little girl, just as he did when she was alive.
It is the only way he can begin to come to terms with a loss that has become his new reality. A brother lays his head on his older sister’s grave, unable to accept that the warm hugs he once received from her are now replaced by the cold earth beneath which she lies.
These are the human consequences of a thoughtless political decision made thousands of miles away, by men in suits who ordered the February 28 strikes that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh (the “Blessed Tree”) school in Minab, killing 168 schoolchildren and extinguishing the hopes and dreams of hundreds of families.
The case against Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, Bessent
Massie’s eight articles of impeachment accuse Hegseth of waging an unprovoked and illegal war against Iran without congressional authorization, continuing the war despite congressional demands for withdrawal, failing to take adequate measures to minimize civilian casualties, using lethal force against suspected drug traffickers outside established law-enforcement procedures, and retaliating against Senator Mark Kelly for reminding US troops that they have a duty to refuse illegal orders.
By American standards, the case is compelling. Hegseth has treated the War Powers Resolution as little more than a suggestion, turned the power of the Pentagon against a senator for speaking out, continued to push for a $350 billion military package, and presided over a department that is withholding its own findings on the Minab school strike until after the midterm elections.
The war against Iran is deeply unpopular, has driven up prices across the world, and has put American troops in danger over a war that Congress never authorized.
Hegseth should go, and so should his boss Donald Trump and others like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent. All of them aided and abetted the war against Iran and have the blood of innocents on their hands.
Whether they will is another matter. Republicans will retain control of the House until January, when Democrats are set to take over. Until then, the war criminals in the Trump administration are threatening Republicans who support impeachment.
But there is a more fundamental question: What, exactly, is the American war secretary being held accountable for?
What Iranians heard
When I spoke to Iranians about the impeachment bill, nobody was impressed. Their reasoning was blunt. Americans, they argued, were not moving against Trump and Hegseth because the war was illegal, because of the Minab school massacre, the attack on the sports hall in Lamerd, where 21 people, mostly children, were killed, the strike on a wedding in Kuhestak, or the attacks on Gandhi Hospital, the Pasteur Institute and the Tofigh Daru pharmaceutical plant.
They are moving against the war criminals because the war failed to achieve its stated and unstated objectives. Americans hate this war because it has driven up the cost of diesel, petrol and groceries at home. Had the war not hit their wallets, Iranians would still be burying their dead with little concern from Washington.
There is a history behind this perception, and it is not difficult to understand why it persists.
In March 2003, George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent security threat.
No active stockpiles of those weapons were ever found. What followed was the devastation of an entire country: the collapse of essential services, years of occupation, insurgency and sectarian violence.
Millions of Iraqis died as a direct or indirect consequence of the brutal invasion and its aftermath. US-led sanctions had already devastated the country, with at least half a million children dying as a result of their effects. The invasion also created conditions that facilitated the rise of the Daesh terrorist group, deepened sectarian divisions and contributed to Iraq's fragmentation.
The consequences extended far beyond Iraq, reshaping the entire West Asian region. The invasion further entrenched American unilateralism and the doctrine of exceptionalism, helping pave the way for subsequent interventions in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Sudan.
Yet, in November 2004, Americans re-elected Bush.
It is worth remembering that opposition to the war was never absent. Millions had taken to the streets in protest before the invasion, and American public opinion increasingly turned against the war as it dragged on. Yet, on Election Day, a majority of voters still backed the president who had taken the country to the unnecessary war. Bush secured another four years in office.
By December, a Washington Post-ABC poll found that 56 per cent of Americans believed the war was not worth fighting. But that shift in public opinion came only after American soldiers continued returning home in body bags and the financial and human costs of the war became increasingly personal.
Despite the absence of the weapons used to justify the invasion, Bush remains free to enjoy the privileges of public life. Americans buy his books, pay him to speak at universities and receive him with respect, despite the profound legal and moral questions surrounding his decision to invade Iraq.
For Iraqis, the distinction between opposing a war and holding those who orchestrated it accountable was anything but academic. They paid for that decision with their lives, their homes and the widespread destruction of their country. The American electorate had the power to remove the president responsible. It chose not to.
Afghans and Pakistanis, too, endured the consequences of the wider so-called “War on Terror” through invasion, occupation, drone strikes and years of insecurity.
Their suffering did not determine the outcome of American elections. Nor did the destruction of their communities and the disruption of their lives carry the same political weight as the economic and security concerns of American voters.
This is the historical indifference many Iranians are referring to. It is not that every American supports war, or that Americans never take to the streets in protest. It is that the distance between those who make these decisions, those who elect them and those who pay for them with their lives is so vast that the suffering of foreign populations can become politically tolerable.
A country that learned to look away
Since America emerged as the world's dominant power, much of its society has remained physically insulated from the wars its government wages abroad. Its citizens do not ordinarily experience the destruction of their neighbourhoods, the collapse of their hospitals or the daily terror of airstrikes.
Instead, they encounter these wars through sanitised news coverage, Hollywood blockbusters, political speeches and video games.
The Iraq war illustrates this distance. Iraqis who survived Saddam Hussein's brutal rule, then the invasion and occupation, and finally the rise of Daesh terrorists in the vacuum that followed, watched their country's catastrophe become yet another distant foreign-policy debate.
And that is precisely what troubles people in Iran. They see a society capable of mobilising when its economic interests are threatened, yet seemingly willing to accommodate years of military intervention so long as the dead are elsewhere.
Americans looked away from Vietnam until the war became too costly. They gradually tuned out Iraq and Afghanistan, then bought tickets to blockbuster films built around the suffering of people they had largely stopped thinking about.
If the bombs had fallen only on Iranian homes, while the price of petrol remained unchanged, would a congressman be reading articles of impeachment on the House floor?
If the children of Minab had been American, would the Pentagon's findings still be withheld until after Election Day? Who decided the findings could wait, and why haven't those responsible been publicly identified?
When a so-called "mistake" kills hundreds of children and nobody is held accountable, what distinguishes a mistake from a policy? And what does it say about the moral priorities of a country when the most compelling argument against a war is its cost?
What is the exchange rate between an Iranian child and a gallon of petrol? Why is "illegal" relegated to a footnote while "expensive" dominates the headlines?
The shadow of something worse
In April, Trump wrote that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." This week, Tucker Carlson, a former ally, claimed that the administration could be days away from launching a nuclear strike on Iran's Pickaxe Mountain site.
The White House has dismissed Carlson's claims, saying he has no insight into military planning. Trump ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in October and told the Financial Times that there was no immediate plan to launch a strike.
But Iranians remember April. A nuclear weapon, tactical or otherwise, would threaten hundreds of thousands of people directly and millions more through its wider consequences.
After Trump's April statement, some lawmakers called for invoking the 25th Amendment. Washington soon moved on, and Americans returned to their daily routines. Iranians, meanwhile, are left wondering why they must live under the shadow of a possible nuclear attack while life carries on as usual in the US and much of the rest of the world.
For Iranians, then, Trump, Hegseth and Rubio should be removed and tried at The Hague. It should be because of the illegality of the war and the war crimes committed against Iranians, not because the war has become too costly for Americans to tolerate.
Iranians know that if the destruction had remained confined to their homes, there would have been no hearings in Washington, no articles of impeachment, nothing.
Impeachment can remove a secretary or president. It cannot answer the grief of a mother sitting beneath a tree, weeping for her little slain daughter.
Only accountability can begin to do that: through an independent investigation, the publication of findings and proceedings before a court in The Hague or another jurisdiction willing and able to hear the case. These war criminals belong in The Hague.
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