This is one man’s view on the morality of Operation Epic Fury.
On the morning of February 28, 2026, the skies over Tehran tore open. Operation Epic Fury decapitated the supreme leadership of a regime that had baptized itself in the blood of its own citizens.
The fires had not yet cooled before critics here in the West began their wailing…chanting from television studios and university enclaves, declaring the strikes as illegal, and calling it warmongering.
They demand peace, and with that, I agree with them. But true peace is not submission of the innocent to the butcher. True peace is not a utopian absence of conflict.
In a fallen world, peace is an achievement.
It’s a structure of moral order that must occasionally be built with the tragic, necessary use of force to paralyze tyranny.
The modern mind recoils at any use of force because it’s forgotten about proper justice. The Apostle Paul, writing to the church in the capital of an empire that would eventually martyr him, lays the mandate of the state bare in Romans 13:4:
“For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain.”
Over the winter, the Iranian regime massacred thousands of its own protesting citizens in the streets of Rasht, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tehran among other cities. Death toll estimates range from the government’s own admission of over three thousand to independent counts exceeding thirty-six thousand.
It funded slaughter across the Levant through its proxy networks. It subjected religious minorities to systematic persecution: nearly twice as many Christians were arrested in 2025 as the year prior, with courts handing down over 280 combined years of prison sentences for the crime of practicing their faith.
The sword of the state isn’t a decorative prop. It’s an instrument of justice. When a Western leader orders a strike against a regime that operates as a syndicate of murder, he is fulfilling his moral duty to shield the innocent from unchecked malice.
Contrast this with the moral framework of secular pacifism. The progressive left watches the daily immolation of women and dissidents in the Middle East with clinical apathy.
The moment force is deployed to strike the architects of that suffering, they erupt into this manufactured outrage.
They are captive to a myth that divides the world into a rigid binary of oppressor and oppressed. In this framework, any assertion of American or Western military power is inherently wicked, and any anti-Western regime, no matter how thoroughly it crushes its own people, is granted the protected status of “victim.”
I don’t believe they hate war. It would appear that they just hate the civilization that retains the moral clarity to win one.
Now…lets be clear, we don’t celebrate bloodshed. No honest man can. Reports from the conflict indicate that strikes killed not only the architects of terror but also civilians, including children at a school in Minab.
American servicemen have also given their lives. All of that is deeply regrettable and I pray for all involved. May God bless them and their families.
The Church has always viewed war as a profound tragedy, another symptom of our exile from Eden. Saint Basil the Great, in his thirteenth canon, advised that soldiers returning from battle should abstain from communion for three years, recognizing that even justified killing leaves a wound upon one’s soul.
The Church Fathers never constructed a theory of just war. They acknowledged that war, while sometimes unavoidable, is never clean and that those who wage it, even in righteous defense, require repentance.
We accept that weight. Acknowledging the sorrow of war does not excuse us from the duty of waging it when justice demands it. Relying on the endless diplomacy of appeasement with actors, who believe that their faith commands them to exterminate you, is not peacemaking.
It’s complicity.
Defending the defenseless, tearing down the scaffolding of terror, and establishing justice is not a departure from Christian morality. It’s a demand of it.
But let no man call this glory. Let those who ordered the strikes and those who carried them out reckon with the cost before God. The path of the Christian warrior ends not in triumph but in repentance…and from that repentance, in the mercy of Christ alone.
Amen.