When Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced, with the satisfied air of an industrialist surveying demolished competition, that Israeli strikes had destroyed around 70 percent of Iran’s steel production capacity, he was not describing a military achievement. He was boasting about an act of economic destruction: one aimed not at soldiers or weapons systems, but at furnaces, factories, and the accumulated industrial labor of millions of Iranians over decades.

“We have severely damaged Iran’s steel and petrochemical sectors,” Katz said, ordering the military to continue striking what he called “the national infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime.” The framing is deliberate: strikes on a country’s industrial base are presented as strikes on a government, as though the two could be neatly separated. They cannot.

The fates of a government and its people are never entirely separable, and Iran is no exception: the Islamic Republic’s industrial policies, planning institutions, and state investment have all played a real part in building what now exists. But the insistence of Israeli and American officials that these strikes are directed at “the regime” rather than at Iran’s people performs a sleight of hand that cannot go unchallenged.