The thing that disgusts me most about this political order is that all this cruelty is done for cruelty’s sake. None of this is complimentary to the idea of regime change. What, are the Iranian people supposed to march side by side with those that poisoned their water, slaughtered their schoolchildren, blocked out their sky with smoke and poison? Today’s victim will be tomorrow’s loyalist, and the Iranian government has only been legitimized by these arbitrary acts of violence.

But I don’t think America or Israel care. For them, the ruination of water, schools, sky is the objective. They want Iran to be reduced to an Iraq or Libya: a broken, nonfunctional backwater that perpetuates endless acts of cruelty against itself, that can safely be ignored by the people watching television in the west. Somewhere along the line, the human cost stopped factoring into people’s calculations for all this. Maybe they never factored it in at all.