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Part of the problem with starting this war to begin with, and both the government of Israel and that of the United States are equally to blame here, is that the war wasn't sold to the American public beforehand in favor of launching a duplicitous surprise decapitation strike. This means that a lot of infrastructure that should have been set up before the war started still isn't put together by the end of the war. There is no combined command. There is little love between the peoples to allow for that kind of cooperation.
What was duplicitous about it? Everyone has known that the relevant aspects of the US Deep State have wanted to bah-bah-bah-bah bah-bah-bomb Iran for like... forty-ish years?
"Surprise" I could live with (although, it wasn't exactly surprising!), but nobody was saying "nah, we love Iran -- we'd never bomb them!"
Everything I was taught growing up that made Pearl Harbor "a day which will live in infamy."
It goes against my basic sense of Americanism.
I don't know enough about the prelude to WW2, but unless the Americans had been using insurgent movements in the Far East to attack Japan, its interests and its allies, funding and directing them more like an irregular part of their military than an ally, for decades, then the situation is not quite the same (I know the US did try to strangle Japan economically, but I think there's something different about economics and waging indirect warfare). Clearly Iran's been poking the bear constantly so getting a reaction at some point is to be expected. The situation more like a bully getting sucker punched after years of abuse; sure he can claim it came out of the blue and was unprovoked and that it wasn't him just his cronies that were doing the violent bullying and some dumb teachers might care, but he damn well deserved it and in a just world it would have happened sooner.
The US did fund Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists in the late 30's.
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The technical term for attacking a country you are at peace with without declaring war, or for resuming attacks when a valid ceasefire is in place without publicly announcing you are revoking the ceasefire, is "perfidious". The US attack on Iran should qualify (I won't argue the technicalities), either on basis that the US and Iran are not at war, that the US was a de facto party to the ceasefire ending the 2025 12-day war or because there was an implied ceasefire for the duration of the ongoing nuclear talks in Oman.
If any of the Iranian officials directly involved in the Oman talks were the subjects of a targeted killing this would also be a separate war crime (attacking diplomats) - although it now looks like this was a mad social media threat that was not carried out, rather than something that happened.
The US and Iran have been at war since about 1979 -- and Iran started it! Invaded sovereign territory, took hostages (diplomats!), the whole bit... seriously, I'm pretty sure there was never a truce declared or anything like that?
"Perfidy" AFAIK specifically refers to violating a flag of truce or wearing enemy uniforms -- surprise attacks don't qualify.
No, the US and Iran were not at war since 1979. Reagan and everyone else involved in Iran-Contra would have been executed for treason if that were the case.
Words have definitions, and war is one of them. If you seriously believe that the United States and Iran have been at War for 47 years, Oliver North is still alive. I suggest we get that treason trial started.
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The US hasn't been at war with anyone since 1942, and 1979 was forty seven years ago. And... look, there is no possible way you would have accepted this reasoning if Iran had shot Donald Trump at a speech or had his secretary blow him up with a briefcase bomb in 2017. No way. Which to me just makes your reasoning look like, "America gets to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime as long as we don't like them and we didn't explicitly promise not to". That's not even perfidy. Perfidy implies the possibility of honour.
The fact is that any country can attack any other country at any time -- as you point out, formal declarations of war haven't been a thing for many many years; it really is the law of the jungle.
If Iran had bombed Trump's inauguration, that would be an act of war; there's no moral valance to that, just that they would get their asses kicked for it.
Did Egypt et al send a diplomat to Tel Aviv to formally slap Golda Meir with a glove or something in 1973? If you want to go to war, you just do it.
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