In Howard Zinn's chapter "just and unjust wars " he describes the tactics used by Pericles to heighten Athen's sense of morality and justness of war7. Zinn went on to talk about how state leaders to create a framework of total good and total evil. In Iran's case, the argument can be persuasive; the grotesque ways in which the government violates the Iranian peoples human rights is cause for concern, yet we cannot use this a crutch for a larger agenda. .

             In the end, America has created a framework in which the Iranian government is painted as an irrational fundamentalist state that only seeks to harm those around it. By doing this, America is using its soft power to gain legitimacy for a preventive attack unlike the invasion in Iraq. So far it has worked. The world fears a nuclear Iran because it is uncertain of what it would do; however, we cannot allow uncertainty and fear to become the basis on which we decide military action. We must act wisely and revise our moral reality before it comes back to haunt us.

             The Unjust War.

             "Preventive war presupposes some standard against which danger is to be measured "8. This is the danger of preventive war. There is a presumption; there is no evidence, only an assumed standard as to how danger should be measured. This standard is based on future possible outcomes, the fear of the unknown, and the likelihood that a shift in the balance of power is imminent if the enemy state is allowed to reach a certain level. The reason to invade Iraq was not based on hard evidence, but the idea that America's security was at stake. The Hussein regime had WMD's! Of course they needed to be stopped before inevitable happened; Iraq would strike and we would be unprepared. In President Bush's national security strategy for 2002 he stated, "It has taken us almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat ". The language that is presented here is not too different from the current rhetoric that President Obama is using towards Iran.