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When Technology Outstrips Morality in War
Readers respond to a guest essay about the U.S. and Israeli missteps in the conflict in Iran.
April 11, 2026,
7:00 a.m. ET
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Samin Ahmadzadeh
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To the Editor:
In “
The Illiteracy of the Iran War
” (Opinion guest essay, March 31), Yonatan Touval correctly diagnoses the strategic failures of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, noting that policymakers possess a flawless “algebra” of destruction while remaining blind to the human realities on the ground. However, attributing this crisis to a lack of “literacy” or historical imagination misidentifies the root cause.
The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and the widening of the war’s economic radius are not merely imaginative failures; they also represent a catastrophic miscalculation of risk.
While the defense and domestic energy sectors may experience a short-term boost from this conflict, the downstream effects on the broader domestic economy are severe.
American households and commercial supply chains are now absorbing the friction of paralyzed logistics networks, spiking fuel costs and lower profits. Relying exclusively on A.I.-powered targeting metrics while ignoring the cascading economic and geopolitical blowback is not an imaginative error — it is a fundamental failure of risk management.
We do suffer not from a deficit of literary imagination in Washington but rather from a strategic architecture that willfully ignores the devastating material costs of its own policies.
Steven Rhodes
Mount Vernon, Va.
To the Editor:
Yonatan Touval offers a brilliant analysis of our failure to understand the difference between winning and losing in Iran. The president’s recent reference to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 may have suggested his unconscious awareness that simply sinking ships does not inspire surrender; it does the opposite.
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