At a recent juncture of its armed conflict with Iran, America announced that its war aims rested on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Well, the Strait was open before the war. Why then the conflict? There are other interesting questions. The US-Israeli attack occurred because Iran had ballistic missiles. Well, the attack gave Iran a reason to use them. As for the prospects of a nuclear Iran, that is certainly true, but whatever in the course of this conflict suggests that Iran will give up pursuing its final weapon after having suffered and survived so much already? Or is the real American-Israeli endgame to destroy Iran the Islamic nation if Iran the ayatollah state cannot be destroyed - that is, if regime change is not possible? Does Persian Iran await the fate of Arab Iraq, Libya and Syria, once-proud nations pushed off the global stage by war and insurrection? What exactly is going on?

An excellent article comes to mind in the context of this quixotic war. It is by independent researcher Riaz Khokhar in Al Jazeera. "The United States-Israeli war on Iran is as much a collision of competing religious ideologies as it is a clash of strategic interests," he writes. "To understand it purely through a secular realist lens is to miss half the story."

Khokhar looks at the three competing ideologies of Christian nationalism, Zionism and messianic Islam. explains: "Christian nationalism, as distinct from mainstream religious conservatism, seeks the subordination of all other religions and cultural systems to Christian supremacy across every domain of political, legal and social existence. This ideology correlates strongly with white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia." Now, there is an effort to take the conflict out of the realm of politics and cast it as a holy war between a Christian nation and a Muslim nation. Among the most influential elements within this tendency are Christian Zionists and evangelical dispensationalists. To extreme Zionist ideologies, "Iran represents a spiritual barrier to the conditions required... to fulfil biblical prophecy" and must therefore be "neutered". On Iran's part, there is its state ideology, Welayat al-Faqih, or the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, which "holds that in the absence of the Twelfth Imam (leader), who is in occultation (ghaybah, or in hiding), supreme authority must rest with a qualified Islamic jurist governing on his behalf. Moreover, factions within Iran's clerical and military establishment went further, transforming the theological expectation of the Mahdi's return into an operational political doctrine". Problematically, the Iranian leadership "has institutionalised the idea that unrelenting struggle against oppressive powers is a sacred obligation. Under this framework, strategic retreat or diplomatic accommodation would be tantamount to prophetic betrayal".

Khokhar concludes: "In religious terms, two civilisational ideologies are in direct structural conflict, each regarding the other's existence in its maximalist form as an obstacle to a divinely sanctioned outcome... The conflict has, in this sense, mutated into a zero-sum collision of competing messianic frameworks, one in which conventional diplomacy is structurally difficult because both sides believe, in their maximalist iterations, that they are executing a divine mandate."

I hope that Khokhar is not right, but if he is, the game is up. Religious wars never end because their endgame lies in the hereafter, not in the here-and-now or in any humanly-predictable future. By contrast, the intrinsic value of the secular understanding of history is that war, like peace, is man-made. Humans make war, and humans make peace, and whatever they choose to do, they do because they are mortals who are not in control of eternity. To mix religion with politics is to hold each hostage to the other. Religion is obliged to act through political actors - American Republicans, Israeli Likudites and Iranian Ayatollahs in equal measure. Then, entire peoples are forced to act politically as if they were working religiously. Religion gets co-opted politically by politics that elevates itself to religion. That disastrous recipe was evident in Europe's Thirty Years War from 1618, whose ruinous end inaugurated the secularisation of international relations in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 through the establishment of the nation-state as the basic unit of international affairs. While nation-states did continue to fight, they did so for reasons that could be controlled - the desire to acquire territory, national resources and so on - and not for reasons that were beyond human creation and therefore control.

I can only hope that the quixotic US-Israeli war with Iran turns out to be a human one after all. If it is religious, good luck to war aims and the Strait of Hormuz.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com