Whataboutism doesn't tell us a lot about the fact that a US war with Iran is a really BAD policy

Wars and lesser international conflicts offer plenty of opportunities for whataboutism, i.e., yeah, what Country X did was bad but just look at what Country Z did!

Which is why listing grievances and competing atrocity stories are insufficient to understanding the causes of a war or the prospects for peace. And the progress made in international law over the last couple of centuries mis a recognition that "whatever you can get away with" is not the highest principle in international affairs, despite the fact that it all too often works out that way in practice.

Graham Fuller reminds us of the superficiality of the Trump Administration justification for the assassination/target killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani (U.S. Foreign Policy by Assassination Responsible Statecraft 01/04/2020):

The trembling puffery and outrage on the part of most politicians and commentators in the US that “Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of any number of American soldiers in Iraq” reflects either childish naivete or massive self-delusion about what the nature of war is all about. Iran knew it was in the US neocon cross-hairs when the US invaded Iraq in 2003; the standing joke in the US then was that war with Iraq is fine, but “real men go to war with Iran.”

The Cheney-Bush Administration had named Iran as one of the three members of David Frum's Axis of Evil along with Iraq and North Korea. The threat of war against Iran were obvious. And the US' close ally Israel, to whom both parties' leaders continually declare to be an invaluable ally, has periodically ever since then threatening to bomb facilities in Iran that Israel claims it is using for nuclear arms development.

The US had fully supported Saddam Hussein’s vicious war against Iran throughout the 1980s. It was not surprising then that Iran aided the massive uprising of Iraqi Sunni and Shi’a forces to resist the US military invasion and occupation of Iraq - a presence that lacked any legal standing. Naturally Iran provided advice and weapons to Iraqi guerrillas to facilitate killing the soldiers of the American occupation, that’s what war is. [my emphasis]

It's also important to remember that during and after the long Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and thereafter until 2003, the Sunni-led Iraq of Saddam Hussein and the Shia government of Iran balanced each other military and political power and therefore limited the potential ambitions of both countries that might be of concern to the US, NATO, or their other neighbors.

But Iraq is also a majority Shia country. So it was clear to most everyone paying attention that removing Saddam's Sunni government with a promise for democratic elections would produce a Shia-dominated government which was likely to have better relations to Iran than Saddam did. And that's what happened. What also happened was a civil war between Shia and Sunni groups with the Kurds a third group of belligerents.

This has never meant that Iraqis Shias were more loyal to Iran than to their own country. Iraqi Shias fought in the Iraqi army in the long war against Iran. They didn't act like some giant Fifth Column of Iran. But there was never any good reason to think that the post-Saddam Iraqi government would be other than close to Iran. Nor that there would be military cooperation between Iran and the Iraqi government as well as between Iran and secular Shia militias in Iraq.

The US has supported any number of guerrilla forces around the world to fight against enemies and regimes we don’t like, starting with military aid, training, intelligence, joint missions, etc., as we have seen most recently in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. There is precious little ground for US moral outrage in all of this - unless one simply assumes, as the US usually does - that America by definition represents the “moral cause,” the “good guys,” and has a god-given right to intervene anywhere and everywhere in the name of freedom, democracy or human rights or to protect whatever it is. [my emphasis]

This does not mean that the US has no good and practical reasons for opposing Iranian policies, as on terrorism. The US certainly has an interest in nuclear nonproliferation in Iran. Which is why it was a great thing that the US and various other countries had come to agreement with Iran in 2015 on an effective arms control regime with extensive international inspections. Donald Trump cancelled that treaty in May 2018 and then opposed severe sanctions of Iran, who had been abiding by the treaty. And only after the Soleimani assassination a few days ago did Iran finally announce it would no longer abide by the treaty.

Whether Qasem Soleimani was a Bad Man or not is really beside the point of whether its either justified or any kind of a practical good idea for the US to have a war with Iran. It's a terrible idea. Fred Kaplan pessimistically concluded immediately after the assassination, "The United States is now at war with Iran." And he does not think that is a good idea. (Trump Just Declared War on Iran Slate 01/03/2020)