On the Death of a Tyrant

On gladness, narcissism, and the men who sent them to die.

The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran is dead. This is good news. The man presided over a theocratic dictatorship that murdered its own people by the thousands — in recent months alone, by the tens of thousands, protesters who rose up against the regime and were killed for it. He sponsored terror across the Middle East for nearly five decades. He was, without qualification, a tyrant. The gladness being felt in Tehrangeles, and in the streets of Tehran, and in the hearts of people who have waited a very long time for this moment, is appropriate gladness. It is earned. It is real. Take it.

But gladness is not analysis.

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As I write this, the United States military has confirmed three service members killed and five seriously wounded in combat operations against Iran. Several others sustained shrapnel injuries and concussions. Air travel across the Middle East has come to a standstill. Iran has already retaliated, striking U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE. Israel has launched another wave of attacks. Major combat operations continue.

These are the first American dead. They will not be the last.

They swore an oath. Not to a president. Not to a party. Not to a foreign government. They swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States — the document that vests the power to declare war in Congress, not in a man posting videos on Truth Social at two-thirty in the morning. They swore an oath to defend that document against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They held up their hand and made that promise, and then they went where they were told to go, because that is what service means, and we asked it of them.

And Donald Trump sent them to die without the authorization that document requires.

Some will say that to question the purpose of their mission dishonors their sacrifice. I would suggest the opposite is true. To look away from the truth of what they were sent to do — to wrap it in flags and call it liberty and move on — is the dishonor. These men deserve the truth more than they deserve our comfort with it.

I do not blame these fallen Americans. I cannot. They were put in an impossible situation — not by their own choices, not by their own failures, but by ours. By our collective failure to keep this republic. By our failure to hold the line before it came to this. They were asked to fight, and they fought, and three of them are dead. But I cannot bring myself to believe that what they were fighting for, in any meaningful sense, was the blessings of liberty. They were fighting for the whims of Donald Trump and the strategic interests of Benjamin Netanyahu. And no amount of flag-draping will change that.

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Clarity requires naming the men who made this decision.

Donald Trump did not launch this war because he believes in the constitutional order, or the security of the American people, or the liberation of the Persian people from theocratic tyranny. He launched it because he is a narcissist — and I mean that in the clinical sense, not the colloquial one.

The narcissist does not experience other people as real. They are instruments, mirrors, or obstacles. The three Americans now dead are, to him, abstractions — useful abstractions, perhaps, the kind that generate the salutes and the flyovers and the solemn faces that narcissists require as proof of their own gravity. But abstractions. The Constitution is an abstraction. The congressional war power is an abstraction. The only thing that is not an abstraction is the reflection in the mirror, and the reflection was in trouble. The Epstein files were circulating. The approval numbers were moving. The news cycle needed turning.

A war turns a news cycle. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a description of how a man without a conscience makes decisions when his image is threatened. He does not calculate the way a statesman calculates — weighing interests, modeling consequences, accepting costs. He reaches for the thing that makes him look strong, because looking strong is the only thing that has ever felt like survival to him. Three Americans are dead because a man who cannot feel other people’s reality needed to feel large again.

Marco Rubio is a different case, and in some ways a more troubling one. Rubio and those around him are true believers. They are on an ideological crusade — a clash of civilizations, as they see it, against the Mullahs. And the Mullahs are, of course, among the evil. No serious person disputes that.

Rubio and the Mullahs are brethren. Both consecrate violence — one with scripture, one with the arc of civilizational destiny. Both believe the emergency is large enough to justify the exception. Both have decided that the rules binding ordinary men do not bind them, because God or history is on their side. There is no honor among thieves. But there are the costs they wreak on the innocent people caught in the space between them. And those costs are now being paid in American blood.

And then there is the liberation narrative — the vulgar fiction that any of this is about the freedom of the oppressed peoples of the great and ancient Persian civilization. That the bombs falling on Tehran are somehow in service of the people who have been living under the boot of the regime we just assassinated the leader of.

These men work alongside Stephen Miller. They break bread with him. They share offices, share agendas, share a political project with a man whose life’s work has been the systematic dehumanization of people who do not look like him. The same people now wrapping themselves in the liberation of Persia have spent their careers building the infrastructure of white supremacy at home. We are asked to believe this is a contradiction. It is not. It is a permission structure — the language of liberation deployed as cover for the exercise of power over people they have never regarded as fully human.

No. The Persian people deserve better than to be conscripted as props in a narrative authored by men who would not let them into the country.

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The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not an army. It is an economic empire with an army attached to it — construction contracts, energy infrastructure, smuggling networks, financial institutions, millions of people whose entire material existence is threaded through its apparatus. Those people did not become democrats when the Supreme Leader died. They became people with everything to lose. And people with everything to lose tend to fight.

The precondition for civil war in Persia was already in place before the first American died. What we are describing now is something larger: an unconstitutional American war, producing American dead, on behalf of no democratic mandate, driven by a narcissist’s need to survive a news cycle and an ideologue’s vision of civilizational destiny — prosecuted inside conditions that no serious military planner would describe as favorable, against an enemy with no intention of simply standing aside.

This is what happens when you remove the constitutional guardrails. Not in theory. Not as a warning. This.

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I have been writing, for weeks and months and years, that the economic elites would not help. The record should show it plainly, today, with three Americans dead and the region on fire. The people with the power to have stopped this — the executives, the investors, the institutional leaders who told themselves that accommodation was pragmatism — chose access over principle. They calculated that the costs would fall on other people. They were right. Those other people are now dead.

I am deeply disappointed. I want to say that without hedging it. Not surprised — I have not been surprised — but disappointed in the way you are disappointed when you watch your country fail a test you knew was coming and could not stop.

The American polity is still, largely, asleep. I believe it will wake up. I believe the midterms will come, and that the people will reassert their sovereignty, and that the seditionists will rue the day. I still believe this. I hold it not as certainty but as the kind of commitment that Camus meant — the choice to push anyway, not because the boulder will stay at the top, but because you are the kind of person who pushes.

But here is where we are, right now, today, while three families have not yet been notified that their person is not coming home.

We are here because we failed. Because we let it get this far. Because the people who should have held the line decided the line was negotiable. Because we did not keep our commitment to those who fight and die to secure the blessings of liberty — and sent them instead to secure the whims of men who have never believed in liberty at all.

The tent still stands. Barely. But three Americans are dead who did not have to die, and the men who sent them there are still in power, and the people who could have stopped it chose not to. That is not tragedy. That is a choice. And choices have authors.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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