If ‘war is hell’, what exactly is Pete Hegseth fighting for in Iran?

On Sunday, March 8, United States Secretary of Defense – sorry, Secretary of War – Pete Hegseth appeared on 60 Minutes, the flagship news magazine show of CBS. In an interview with Major Garrett (a news anchor, not a military officer, that’s just his name) Hesgeth let rip, once again, in the style to which we have, alas, become accustomed. “This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing the enemy to their knees,” he said, sounding like the opening voiceover of a second-rate action flick. Garrett asks about potential Russian involvement, and whether this puts US personnel in any more danger.

“No one’s puttin’ us – us in danger,” Hegseth replies with bombast. “We’re puttin’ the other guys in danger, and that’s our job. So we’re not concerned about that. We mitigate it as we need to. Our commanders factor all of this. But the only ones that need to be worried right now are – are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.”

I have not edited this extract of the transcript, which appears on CBS’s own website. It’s interesting to note that the site has retained the speaker’s speech pattern: puttin’, gonna, which contributes to the gunslingin’ swagger. (I read the quote, in best American-Hegseth style, into the transcription software I use: gonna came out fine, but no matter how many times I said puttin’ it was nicely tidied to putting, so this feels like a deliberate choice by Bari Weiss’s CBS.)

Revelling in violence towards a general population – tens of thousands of whom have been slaughtered for protesting against the actions of their government – is repugnant. It is of a piece with the statement Hegseth made at the outbreak of the war: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.” Lest anyone be in any doubt, he returned to his bloodthirsty theme on Tuesday: “This is not 2003,” he said, referring to the Iraq war. “This is not endless nation-building,” he said. “Our will is endless,” was the kicker. A reference to Leni Riefenstahl? The only thing that would be surprising about that would be the necessity for some historical and cultural background.

One might ask, at least, whether there is any such thing as a "politically correct war”. “War is hell and always will be”, Hegseth went on to say in that briefing, quoting General William Tecumseh Sherman – at least the quote has always been widely attributed to him. Sherman, in the American Civil War, was one of the pioneers of the explicit targeting of a civilian population in the brutally destructive campaign of total war he waged through the state of Georgia at the end of 1864. The surrender of the Confederacy followed not long after.

It is possible to remember the Civil War as a moral victory, as a war against enslavement, as a war for a bright, if tarnished, ideal. Yet approximately 750,000 Americans died in that conflict: if we take that as a proportion of the 21st-century US population, the equivalent would be six million dead. So yes: war is hell.

But this war in Iran (or conflict, or “excursion”) has no defined aim. Is it to protect the rights of the Iranian people? To prevent Iran developing its nuclear capabilities? To enact Bibi Netanyahu’s decades-long desire to eradicate the Iranian regime?

To put in in Hegseth’s terms: fuck knows. What is certain is that the language we’re hearing reveals an attachment not to purpose or ideals – however corrupted – but to the image and storytelling of violence driven by machismo alone. This, truly, is hell.

Photograph by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images