Signifying Nothing - US Operation Epic Fury
Last Updated: 2026-02-28 00:00:00 -0600
It’s 9 AM on a Saturday morning and somehow I am already an hour into having learned that the looming US strike on Iran has finally happened, and that they’ve only gone ahead and gotten Israel involved too. The US has named this operation “Epic Fury”, which always brings to mind the old Shakespeare saw “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It’s easy to get pulled into asides about the name of the operation and wrack up a few quick morale-boosting rhetorical kills against the men in the US who made this decision, but that would be missing the broader point here.
Being the aggressor in a war almost never actually benefits the aggressor and almost never turns out to be morally justifiable. This only gets worse when you’re squaring up against a near-parity force. Not that anyone is near-parity to the US but for a country that outspends any given 20 or so collectively on their military they do have a shocking habit of losing almost any time they’re the ones in charge, which is interesting in a case like this.
If POTUS was undeniably mentally competent, it’d be pretty easy to make the argument that the sole responsibility for his actions lay with him. But to be honest, even in cases where the position is being held by a mentally competent individual, one man can never be solely responsible for war. Thousands of people between his whims and the blood on the pavement have to accept the necessity of the war and engage in the business of bringing the war about. It’s a bit like the problem where a toddler gets control of a motor vehicle and kills the old lady across the street when they back into the rosebushes; you don’t arrest the toddler, but the parent.
The citizens of the US and Israel, and their partner nations in the conflict, have a responsibility to immediately down tools, especially if they’re actually in these nations’ respective Military-Industrial complexes. “Not in my name” has to be more than your muttered Nuremberg defense. It is your rallying cry, the first line of your protest songs and if need be the last line of your epitaphs. Get yourselves familiar with the CIA simple sabotage field manual. Lose work orders that would facilitate the war. Struggle to process tax filings. Continue to clog the toilets on the USS Ford.
Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of people on all the sides of the conflict are about to die so that a few mostly old mostly white mostly men are going to be able to feel like they created a place in history for themselves. And to be entirely too fair to them, they have.
But that place has to be in Den Hague, and if you in any way are helping to hand them the keys, you need to be right there with them.