The narrative or war as a breakdown of reason is a misleading claim. It flatters the modern nation-state and hides the political economy that sustains its availability. The modern state is, in a strict sense, an institution organised around the justified use of violence. The state is not a moral community that sometimes turns violent; it is an institution that secures order by reserving the right to coerce, to classify, to police, to punish and - when it chooses - to kill.

People sometimes speak of science as innocent; blaming only its ‘misuse’ for harm. Yet there may be features in modern scientific practice that make it remarkably available to the powerful: its preference for abstraction over lived experience; its impatience with moral ambiguity; and its habit of converting questions of ends into questions of means. When knowledge is organised primarily as control, it will predictably serve those who already command the means of control. Modern reductionist science has, therefore, not stood outside state violence as a neutral lamp of progress; it has not merely accompanied this arrangement; it has supplied its methods and instruments - measurement, surveillance, prediction and the technical imagination of ‘solutions’ that render the world into targets, variables and ‘problems’ to be managed.

In periods of capitalist stress - when legitimacy thins, inequality hardens and surplus looks for outlets - war and militarisation acquire an additional function: they stabilise the military industrial complex through public spending; open or police trade and energy corridors; and convert spatial management into a ‘risk control’ technique. Imperialism, in this sense, is less a mood than a method. It keeps certain spaces governable; its keeps certain sovereignties conditional. To these ends it uses a mix of force and capital.

Liberalism carries a flaw at its root: it cannot speak of a shared common good without treating it as coercion. It therefore empties politics of moral purpose and replaces it with procedure. In that vacuum, moral claims become incommensurable: rights, freedom, security - none can genuinely adjudicate the other. This leaves ‘settlement’ to the strongest institution. The modern state then presents itself as a neutral manager with a monopoly of violence. It turns ethical conflict into administration and administration into necessity. This is how violence acquires a clean vocabulary. The war machine can then operate while sounding principled.

Vandana Shiva’s critique sharpens the point with an epistemology of violence: reductionist science, she argues, is not merely a method but a political style - one that fragments complex living systems into controllable parts, then treats the resulting control as progress. In war, this reductionism becomes literal: a society becomes a set of nodes; a state becomes an ‘array;’ human lives become ‘collateral’ to a target list. Even the vocabulary - C2, suppression of air defences, cyber disruption - announces a world understood as machinery. She has written in a deliberately unsettling register that 80 percent of modern scientific endeavour is tied to war-making. So much for the civilisational orientation of modern science.

An enabling condition resides within the US imperialist machine. It is the fundamentalist Christian-Zionist networks that keep entering the state’s moral script - through appointments, platforms and the language that senior officials use to explain violence. One can see it in the officialisation of a White House Faith Office; in Secretary Rubio’s sermons glorifying the imperial past and recasting geopolitics as the defence of Western civilisation and Christian heritage; and in crusader-coded signals around defence leadership brushed off as harmless style. It leaks into the chain of command as well: reports describe commanders briefing troops in end-times language - as if Iran is not a political conflict but God’s timetable. This doesn’t replace strategy; it poisons it by giving force a holy cover; making escalation feel like virtue; and expansionism as a duty.

In periods of capitalist stress - when legitimacy thins, inequality hardens and surplus looks for outlets - war and militarisation acquire an additional function: they stabilise the military industrial complex through public spending; open or police trade and energy corridors; and convert spatial management into a ‘risk control’ technique.

As we then look at Iran, the first thing to resist is the lazy contrast between ‘rational modern states’ and an ‘irrational theocracy.’ Iran is just as modern a nation-state. It has its Nizam, Shoora Nigehban, Majmah Mashkhees Maslihat Nizam, parliament, Majlis Khabargan-e-Rahbari, Nizam-e-Adl, Artsh Jamhori Islami, IRSG, Bseej - whose legitimacy is articulated in a different idiom. That vocabulary does not place it outside modernity; it is one of modernity’s hybrids. The tension within it is not difficult to state: a polity that claims an ethical foundation will, once it takes the modern state-form, be repeatedly pulled toward raison d’état — toward survival, sovereignty and enforceability - because these are the goods the state is built to secure first.

Under external assault, modern states do what modern states do: centralise, securitise, harden and turn survival into the highest moral claim as the only guardian. This is why the project of keeping Iran ‘punishable’ is so central: bombs and sanctions are not just about a ‘file,’ they are about preserving asymmetry - ensuring that Iran remains administratively and economically disciplinable, never solidifying into an equal that must be negotiated with on reciprocal terms and so that the broader regional order remains aligned with the interests of those who underwrite it. Pressure thus becomes a technology of governance.

But Iran cannot be understood only through state institutions and strategic doctrines. Its political life is also formed by memory and moral language. One of the most instructive features of the revolution that founded the Islamic Republic was its capacity to translate a religious repertoire into mass politics: the Karbala paradigm - martyrdom, injustice, the righteous minority confronting tyranny - became a shared framework through which ordinary people could interpret authority and resist it. In a world where modern war works by reduction - turning societies into ‘systems,’ cities into ‘nodes’ and lives into ‘collateral’ - Karbala functions almost as an inverse technology: it re-moralises injury; refuses the neutrality of technique; and makes suffering speak in a grammar of justice. This is why pressure does not simply weaken such a formation; it can be metabolised as proof and folded into a long-trained sensibility in which siege confirms truth and endurance becomes legitimacy.

At the same time, this is precisely the danger: the modern state can capture this moral archive and convert it into a security doctrine, using martyrdom not to restrain violence but to licence it. Beneath this Shi’i grammar there is an older civilisational archive - Persianate memories of statehood, conquest, humiliation, restoration - together with complicated, uneven histories with Arab power that can be reactivated under siege as questions of dignity and identity. Under assault, these two currents intensify together - the popular capacity to read coercion as injustice, and the state’s capacity to translate that injustice into securitisation.

That is why the present war is not only a clash of capabilities. It is a struggle over interpretation, over naming: who gets to define ‘justice,’ ‘victimhood’ and legitimate violence? Who gets to label killing as ‘preemption’ and resistance as ‘terror;’ strangulation as ‘pressure’ and survival as ‘defiance.’

To attack Iran, then, is not only to target infrastructure and procurement; it is to wager that the default technology of modernity - coercion backed by capital and technique - can overpower, or successfully hijack, a moral grammar that has already rehearsed - religiously and civilisationally - suffering as evidence and survival as a claim to truth

The writer is a practicing lawyer in Islamabad: @asad.juttah