Sometimes, The Collateral Damage Is Necessary

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

As I read the host’s gentle chastisement of the president for letting Iran, once again, up off the mat, the phrase that is the title of this piece crossed my mind.  Somewhere, starting around the time of our Civil War, industrialization joined hands with warfare, and the idea that war was a purely soldier upon soldier affair died.  The resultant collateral damage reached its zenith with the use of nuclear weapons in WWII.  We have spent the last century and a half trying to put that genie back in the bottle, but to no avail.  Simply put, too many are so morally bankrupt that they would, and have, put that technology to truly nefarious use.  We are left with no choice but to respond in kind, or allow evil to prevail.  Sadly, it comes down to simple math.

I spent the weekend with out-of-town guests.  Yesterday I went with one of the them to visit the various Manhattan Project sites in nearby Oak Ridge, TN.  Our guide-for-that -adventure’s grandfather was stationed in the Pacific, preparing to invade Japan when we used the first nuclear weapons and indirectly saved his grandfather’s life, leading eventually to his birth.  That same grandfather spent his entire post-war working life working in the uranium enrichment plants in Oak Ridge, eternally grateful for the bomb.  One man’s unthinkable weapon was another man’s savior.

It is estimated that the combined, Fat Man and Little Boy killed about a quarter of a million people – a truly frightening number of deaths from just two bombs.  Yet, it is estimated that had the invasion of Japan proceeded millions would have died – thus creating a horrible, extremely difficult to contemplate, moral calculus.  We sacrificed lives in the hundreds of thousands to save lives in the millions.  Of course we wished and still wish, for some third alternative, but honestly none existed.

President Trump is faced with a similar moral calculus.  The mullahs and IRGC in Iran have proven that nothing short of their utter and complete destruction will stop them.  That utter and complete destruction of them will produce massive collateral death and destruction visited on people who want little more than to themselves be free of the oppression those mullahs and that army visit upon them.  Those innocents have already sacrificed their own in the tens of thousands to plead their case, only to have the monsters shoot them down in cold blood.  But what we have seen, repeatedly is that the third alternative simply does not exist.

Just as Japanese imperial fanaticism would have armed every citizen of the nation upon our invasion resulting in those millions of deaths, denying any opportunity for “a deal,” so the fanaticism of the mullahs and the IRGC deny us the third option with Iran.  We lack the means to arm the innocents sufficiently to permit a revolt.  Any such revolt would likely result in as many innocent deaths and suffering as collateral damage from our attacks.  The mullahs and IRGC have shown no hesitancy to slaughter their populace in extreme numbers, they would most assuredly do so again.  They have long since demonstrated that no deal is truly meaningful.

Our options are to leave them in place after which they will soon begin to visit their terrorism on the world once again – resulting in thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of deaths world wide – or we destroy them and, most sadly, a number of innocents that live under their oppression in the effort.  It is a horrific moral calculus, to choose between a bucket of death and a bushel of death, but those are the only options open to us.

The president is the decision-maker-in-chief.  This is the job he signed up for.  Like it or not.