Kenneth Roth on War, Law, and the Iran Reckoning

At “War, Law, and What Comes Next: The Iran Reckoning,” the central issue was not strategy or outcome, but legality.

Kenneth Roth, who led Human Rights Watch for nearly three decades, used the forum at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights to dissect the war in Iran as a matter of law. In conversation with Mathias Risse, the Center’s director, he argued that the conflict falters at the most basic threshold: justification.

Roth structured his remarks around three questions: how the war began, how it has been fought, and what it has achieved.

On the first, he was direct. International law sets a high bar for the use of force. Under the U.N. Charter, a country may go to war in self-defense only in response to an actual or imminent attack, or with authorization from the Security Council. Neither, he said, was present here.

“The idea of an imminent armed attack generally requires something like massing troops at the border, and nobody claims that Iran was doing that,” Roth said, rejecting the claim that the war was defensive. What remained was a justification rooted in potential future threats—a preventive war, which the Charter was designed to prohibit.

“The idea of an imminent armed attack generally requires something like massing troops at the border, and nobody claims that Iran was doing that.” 

Humanitarian arguments fared no better. While Iran’s government had violently suppressed protests earlier in the year, Roth said the timing mattered. Military intervention, he argued, can only be justified to stop ongoing or imminent mass killing, not to respond to past abuses. “Because of the danger of war, the concept of humanitarian intervention should be limited to circumstances where you’re stopping ongoing killing,” Roth said.

His conclusion was unequivocal: “So I think there’s no fair assessment of what Trump and Netanyahu did, but to call it an act of aggression.”

Roth then turned to how the war has been fought, where the legal questions become more granular. Even an unlawful war, he noted, can still be fought within the bounds of international humanitarian law. Those rules require militaries to distinguish between civilian and military targets and to ensure that any civilian harm is not excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated.

In practice, he suggested, those standards have not always been met.

He pointed to an Israeli strike on oil depots outside Tehran that released toxic smoke across the city. While the facilities may have had some military use, the law requires more than that. Commanders must weigh the expected civilian harm against the military advantage. In this case, the scale of the environmental and civilian impact raised serious questions about whether that standard was met.

More striking was a U.S. attack on a girls’ elementary school next to a Revolutionary Guard base, which killed more than 150 children. Roth did not suggest the school was deliberately targeted, but he emphasized how easily it could have been identified. “The slightest due diligence would have raised questions,” he said, noting that even publicly available satellite imagery showed clear signs of a school.

The legal distinction turns on intent. A tragic mistake may not be criminal; a reckless failure to verify a target can be. Roth stopped short of a definitive judgment but made clear where the evidence pointed. “Certainly if you look at it circumstantially, it looks like it was reckless.”

More broadly, he warned that signals from political leadership risk eroding adherence to these rules. Dismissing the laws of war or prioritizing “lethality” over legality does more than shape rhetoric. It sets the tone for how seriously those constraints are followed in practice.

Roth then turned to the issue of attacks on infrastructure. In modern war, he argued, the consequences of such strikes extend well beyond the moment of impact.

Electrical systems, in particular, sit at the center of civilian life. When they are destroyed, the effects cascade. Hospitals stop functioning, water systems fail, food spoils, and basic sanitation breaks down. What begins as a strike on a facility can quickly become a broader humanitarian crisis.

This understanding, Roth noted, was not always reflected in military doctrine. During the first Gulf War, the United States targeted Iraq’s power plants without fully accounting for the downstream consequences. Subsequent investigations, including work by Human Rights Watch, documented how the loss of electricity contributed to widespread civilian suffering and death.

That experience led to a shift. Military planners began to account not only for the immediate effects of an attack, but for its longer-term civilian impact. In later conflicts, the United States sought to disable electrical systems temporarily rather than destroy them outright.

Under current interpretations of international law, Roth argued, that evolution has hardened into a legal expectation. Attacks must be assessed not only at the moment they are carried out, but for their foreseeable effects over time. Against that backdrop, recent threats to destroy Iran’s electrical infrastructure take on a different significance.

“On its face, threatening to obliterate the generators is threatening a war crime,” Roth said.

Whether such threats would be carried out remains uncertain. But, he suggested, the gap between political rhetoric and military practice is narrowing, particularly as safeguards within the system are weakened.

If the legal case for the war is weak and its conduct troubling, its results, Roth argued, are equally uncertain.

One of the few discernible aims—regime change—has not materialized. Roth described how Israeli intelligence enabled a targeted strike that killed Iran’s top leadership, creating what was seen as an opening to topple the regime. But the anticipated popular uprising did not follow. Instead, the government has held, and in some respects hardened. “We are stuck with this regime,” Roth said, rejecting the idea that continued military pressure would produce a different outcome.

Efforts to degrade Iran’s military capacity have also yielded only partial results. While key assets have been damaged, Iran continues to operate across the region and retains the ability to launch attacks, albeit at a reduced pace. The idea that sustained bombing alone could eliminate that capacity, Roth suggested, is unrealistic.

“The U.S. is actually negotiating from a worse position.”

The nuclear issue, long at the center of tensions, has become more complicated. Before the United States withdrew from the Obama-era agreement, Iran’s program was constrained by limits on enrichment and intrusive inspections. Now, Roth noted, Iran possesses significantly enriched uranium and has little reason to trust future negotiations. “The U.S. is actually negotiating from a worse position,” he said.

At the same time, the war has revealed a new source of leverage for Iran. By disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the country demonstrated how quickly it could affect global energy markets. What had long been viewed as a theoretical threat is now a practical one, shaping both economic conditions and diplomatic calculations.

The result is a more difficult negotiating landscape. Iran enters talks with new confidence and new demands, while the United States faces growing pressure to bring the conflict to an end.

Still, Roth argued that a diplomatic solution remains within reach. The components of a deal—limits on enrichment, inspections, and the disposition of existing uranium—are well understood. “All of that is totally doable,” he said.

The challenge, Roth suggested, is not technical but political. The contours of a deal are well understood. What may be missing is the willingness to pursue it.