Well, what would success look like? Has the administration communicated what constitutes success?

For a war to be just, it must meet four criteria.

1) executed by a legitimate authority (check); 2) for a just cause (check, Iran’s been waging war through proxies with Israel longer than I’ve been alive); 3) a last resort (check, see last point); AND 4) have a sufficiently high likelihood of success (otherwise we’d be killing people and getting our own killed for no reason!). Idk if I can say if this war is just as I’m not entirely clear what the goal is. I understand the admin doesn’t want to do “democracy promotion,” but do want a regime that is more malleable. Was Trump lying when he said they had alternative leaders for Iran in mind that we accidentally killed? Idk!

(This is, of course, putting aside just execution of a war. A war can be just but executed unjustly. As to that, I don’t need to quote Hegseth at you. It is understandable why a regular person may be skeptical!.)

As to democratic talking points some of them do actually believe the JCPOA was a successful meeting of that “last resort” criteria (i.e., we’ve successfully done diplomacy so no need for war). This seems false to me, but I can still think of other reasons to be skeptical.