I wasn't trying to talk about the morality of the US's actions (not that the police are inherently moral), only point how it seems purposefully misleading to remove the direct actor from the equation.
If you want, we can change the moral insinuations. "The bully hit himself in the face." No, the poor kid being teased hit the bully in the face.
And in fact, rhetorical tools like that make it easier for people who disagree with the authors stance to discard the author's argument on the whole. "This person either doesn't understand the situation well enough, or is willingly lying to me. Why would I listen to them."
In your example, the bank robbers started the situation.
Who started the war again? Was it Iran that started bombing the US unprovoked, or the US that started bombing Iran unprovoked?
Trump said he started the war because Iran was about to nuke the United States, despite months before saying their nuclear programs were totally obliterated, and his own DNI stating there was no evidence Iran had actually restarted their nuclear programs. Once again, who is the but-for cause of our current state of affairs?
It is absolutely not misleading to point the blame of the current state of affairs at Trump. We wouldn't be in this mess if it wasn't for his extreme incompetence. We didn't have to start this war, its his war of choice. If you stick your hand in a blender and turn it on you don't blame the blender for your mangled hand. The Straight being closed was an obvious out come of his actions, he was made aware of it, and he started the war anyway despite the US not needing to be involved. He himself campaigned on not getting involved in scenarios exactly like this.
It’s totally fair to point the first domino being his. In fact, most of your comment seems to be arguing against a position I don’t hold. However, unlike a blender, Iran has agency. You cannot rewrite history because you don’t like the actors.
> the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz
Trump's choices and actions directly led to the situation we're in, right? As in, if he didn't choose to start an ill-planned war based off lies, we wouldn't be here, correct? Is there any part of the above that's actually incorrect or untrue? Iran wouldn't have just closed the Strait for giggles would they? So why is the Straight closed again? Because Trump is a gullible moron or is deeply compromised by Israel. Or potentially both!
> Iran has agency
Trump has had agency as well throughout this whole thing, and continues to be involved in an illegal war he chose to start on the other side of the planet. The US doesn't need to continue to be involved, it didn't need to start the war in the first place.
You mentioned wanting to avoid moral insinuations and focus purely on the direct actors, but both of the analogies you used (police vs. robbers, bullied kid vs. bully) inherently rely on moral framing. They cast one side as a legitimate authority or innocent victim, and the other as the undisputed aggressor.
If the goal is truly to look at this without moral bias and just examine the causal chain of events, those analogies don't work. There is no geopolitical equivalent of your examples without bias. It's two competing states engaged in an escalating conflict. When you use analogies that bake in a "good guy/bad guy" dynamic, it introduces the exact moral framing you stated you were trying to avoid.
The first example was just the first that came to mind. The second was chosen in the opposite direction because that poster didn’t like the unintentional insinuation that the US was in the moral right; I chose something that has the opposite framing to show that it holds independently of who’s wrong.
