On April 4, we announced the resumption of the weekly live Q-and-A session we did every Friday night during our SYSTEM UPDATE program when it was on Rumble. Those segments were often the most popular among our viewers and subscribers. As it turned out, I was traveling throughout the U.S. over the last couple of weeks for several events, including an ext…

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In August 2013 — in the wake of our Snowden reporting, which revealed the NSA’s mass warrantless domestic spying on Americans — an extraordinary bipartisan bill emerged. Jointly sponsored by one of the most liberal House members (Michigan Democrat John Conyers) and one of his most libertarian-conservative counterparts (Michigan Republican Justin Amash), the bill would have reined in the NSA’s domestic spying powers by imposing serious limits on how such powers can be exercised when aimed at American citizens.

When the Conyers-Amash bill was first introduced, “Official Washington” did not take it seriously. But the Snowden revelations were causing serious public anger about NSA spying, and many members of Congress shared that anger because they were not told that the NSA had implemented a system of mass warrantless surveillance aimed, in part, at Americans. As a result, support for the bill quickly picked up bipartisan steam, seemingly heading toward certain passage — until Barack Obama called Nancy Pelosi.

Despite running for President as a constitutional law professor who vowed to end the civil liberties abuses of the War on Terror, Obama had become an enthusiastic supporter — and user — of the NSA’s domestic spying system. He thus instructed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to whip enough Democratic House votes to kill the bill. She did as she was told, and the bill — which initially appeared on its way to approval — was defeated 205-217 (94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for the reform bill; 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted against it). Official Washington heralded Pelosi as the heroine who saved NSA warrantless spying on Americans:

It is hard to overstate how significant the passage of this bill would have been. It would have been the first time in two decades that the U.S. Congress limited rather than increased the domestic powers of the U.S. security state. The era of the Patriot Act would finally have been confronted, or at least diluted. But Obama and Pelosi joined hands with the likes of GOP pro-spying members such as Peter King, Michelle Bachmann, and Kristi Noem to block any limits on the NSA’s power to spy on Americans without warrants.

Now, Donald Trump is on the verge of doing what Obama and Pelosi did back then. Despite running in 2024 by vowing to “KILL FISA,” based on his (quite valid) claim that spying powers had been abused against him for political ends in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump on Monday demanded that FISA be fully renewed: yet again, with no reforms, safeguards, or limits of any kind.

Congress this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday, will vote on a renewal of Section 702 of FISA, which grants the NSA the power to spy on certain communications of American citizens without a warrant. Although it appeared that there was bipartisan support for finally imposing some limits and safeguards in the wake of years of documented abuses, Trump’s demand on Tuesday — that all House Republicans unite to renew the spying powers with no limits — raises serious doubts about whether any reform is now possible.

Section 702 of FISA has a nefarious genesis. And since its enactment in 2008, it has had a truly bizarre history of being renewed by Congress and the White House in the most confounding yet revealing ways.

After 9/11, the Bush administration — for the first time in American history — ordered the NSA to spy on the communications of American citizens without the warrants required by the law and the Constitution. They did so by eliminating the requirement that forces the NSA, when spying on foreign nationals, to immediately stop spying once it becomes apparent that they were listening to Americans on phone calls or reading their emails.

Instead, Bush-Cheney — in secret, and in violation of the clear terms of the law — ordered the NSA to keep listening and keep reading even if they knew they were spying on Americans without warrants. (Warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. A core purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to require warrants before the government can spy on American citizens.)

The FISA Act was first enacted in 1978, and a core purpose was to require warrants for all NSA spying on American citizens after the Church Committee revealed extensive spying abuses aimed at Americans. During the War on Terror, several NSA whistleblowers — including Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, and others — came forward when they discovered that the NSA had violated what they were taught was the core taboo of the U.S. deep state: not directing its vast power on foreign adversaries but instead turning its power inward on Americans.

(I wrote my first book in 2006, devoted exclusively to the Bush-Cheney NSA scandal and the illegality of this warrantless domestic spying, and wrote another book in 2013 on my work with Snowden, showing how NSA spying had become virtually ubiquitous under Obama. The attack on core constitutional privacy has been a focus of mine for two decades precisely because of the severity of its erosons.)

The revelations of this post-9/11 NSA domestic spying program in 2005 caused a major public scandal, presaging the much more extensive revelations from the Snowden archive. Americans are taught from a young age that a defining trait of our government is that it cannot spy on us — on our actions, our papers, our conversations, our emails — without warrants.

But rather than punish those who spied on Americans with no warrants, Congress instead acted to retroactively legalize this warrantless domestic spying in 2008 by enacting Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (when doing so, Congress also, for good measure, voted to retroactively immunize the large telecom companies that had allowed the U.S. government to illegally spy on Americans; at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, I covered a party that AT&T lobbyists threw for the “Blue Dog Democrats” to thank them for this retroactive immunity). Section 702 basically permitted the NSA to continue spying on Americans’ conversations when talking to targeted foreign nationals, even when no warrants were obtained.

So controversial were the Section 702 spying powers that, in 2008, Congress…

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NOTE FROM GLENN GREENWALD: This article is part of our Outside Voices freelance articles that we publish here. While we edit and fact-check the content to ensure factual accuracy, our publication of an Outside Voices article or op-ed does not necessarily mean we agree with all or even any of the views expressed by the writer, who is guaranteed editorial freedom here.

By Jeremy Loffredo

There is a version of the Democratic Party that exists only in the imagination: the peace party, the anti-war party, the party that marched against the Iraq War and howled at its neocon designers. As Donald Trump (reportedly) accepted Iran’s ceasefire terms this week, some of the most pointed attacks coming his way from Democrats are not about the thousands of civilians killed, the weeks of brutal bombardments against medical centers and universities, or the global economic damage the war has caused. They are about the war ending before the U.S. and Israel finished the job.

And this is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a pattern coming from Democratic senators, the Democratic House Foreign Affairs Committee, ranking members of the Armed Services Committee, and some of the party’s most prominent voices. The liberal opposition party wants more war.

This pattern predates the war. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris called Iran America’s “greatest adversary,” vowed that Iran would never obtain a nuclear weapon under her watch, and argued that Iran’s attacks on Israel would not have happened under her presidency. The Democratic nominee for president was running on a promise to be harder on Iran than Donald Trump.

“What a disaster”

On April 7, 2026, as a ceasefire between the United States and Iran was announced following weeks of devastating U.S.-Israeli bombing campaigns, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) took to X to offer his initial reaction: not relief at the end of the killing, but outrage at the terms Trump had accepted to stop it.

“It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran,” Murphy wrote. “The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking. What on earth is happening?”

And Murphy is not a Democratic Party outlier. The New York Times has called Murphy “one of the future leaders of the party.” The Guardian, the Times, and NBC News have all listed him as a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has named him one of the party’s “best messengers.” Foreign Policy magazine has called him a “rising Democratic star.”

For Murphy, attempting to end a war against a civilian population that had been brutally bombed for over five weeks was just infuriating.

In a follow-up thread, he wrote: “They will control and toll the Strait for the first time. They keep their nuclear program. They keep their missiles. What a disaster.”

And should anyone point out that at least the killing had stopped, Murphy had an answer ready: “An anti-American regime is in power and emboldened. Iran still has their missiles and nuclear program. That’s ‘good’?”

Murphy is not arguing that the war was unjust, that it violated international law, or that it killed too many innocent women and children, all of which are true and documented. He’s arguing that the ceasefire is a bad deal because it leaves the Iranian government standing with its nuclear program and ballistic missiles intact.

Having a civilian nuclear program is a legal right under Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory. But Murphy is treating Iran’s exercise of their international right as an American defeat. And as for their intolerable missiles, most countries have militaries, and every country has the right to them.

Trump, for his part, had no good options left: Iran had closed the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices had spiked globally, and American military objectives had not been achieved. The only path out was accepting terms. Stopping the bombing has already saved lives and protected a civilian population from further devastation. Murphy’s “Democratic rising star” objection is not that the war was wrong but that it ended before the Iranian state was entirely destroyed.

‘TACO’ Trump

Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, had established this line — attacking Trump from the right — months earlier, during nuclear deal negotiations in mid-2025. When Trump was reportedly exploring a diplomatic agreement with Tehran as an alternative to war, Schumer coined an acronym: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

“When it comes to negotiating with the terrorist government of Iran, Trump’s all over the lot,” Schumer said. “One day he sounds tough, the next day he’s backing off. If TACO Trump is already folding, the American public should know about it.”

Schumer was not criticizing Trump for threatening war; he was criticizing him for not following through on those threats, demanding that Trump be tougher on Iran at a moment when most Americans, including supermajorities of his own party, supported a diplomatic nuclear deal. Foreign Policy magazine noted that Schumer’s attack was from a position to Trump’s right, using the language of Iran hawks.

When the ceasefire was finally announced, Schumer held a press conference in New York and went through the deal point by point, explaining why the outcome represented an American failure. “The Strait of Hormuz is in worse shape today, with more Iranian domination of it than it was before the war started,” Schumer said. “Iran still has an ayatollah named Khamenei. The Iranian regime is still standing. Not just standing, but now emboldened. And the regime is likely to be even more radical and more dangerous than it was before.” He called Trump “a military moron” and said the war had made the United States worse off than before it started. The Senate’s top Democrat was not upset that the war happened. He was upset that it hadn’t achieved more.

Venezuela: Trump Didn’t Finish the Job

In January 2026, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a nighttime raid and flew him to New York to face drug trafficking charges. Within weeks, the Trump administration settled into a working relationship with Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, now Venezuela’s acting president. Trump, having removed Maduro, chose to work with the Venezuelan regime rather than dismantle it. Rodriguez, previously sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department, was quietly removed from the sanctions list in April 2026.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats posted a screenshot of the New York Times article reporting the sanctions removal and responded:

“Delcy was Maduro’s brutal co-conspirator to steal an election and repress Venezuelans. 3 months later she’s off the US sanctions list, with zero plans for reforms and her regime still harassing and jailing its political opponents. Trump doesn’t care about Venezuela’s democracy, just its oil.”

Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the body in Congress responsible for overseeing U.S. foreign policy, were not satisfied. The problem, in their telling, was not that Trump had removed a foreign head of state by military force. It was that Trump had cut a deal with his successor rather than going for full regime change.

The Impeachment Spectacle

In 2019, Democrats launched an impeachment process that would run for months, producing two weeks of nationally televised public hearings, 12 witnesses, and more than 30 hours of testimony, before the full House voted to impeach in December. The central charge was that Trump had frozen $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, weapons intended to be used against Russia, a U.S. adversary. Withholding them was, in the Democratic telling, an impeachable betrayal of American interests. Fast forward to 2026: Trump waged a 40-day bombing campaign against Iran, a U.S. adversary, without congressional authorization, and Democrats introduced not impeachment articles but complaints that he failed to hit Iran hard enough.

When Trump withheld weapons from a U.S. enemy’s enemy, Democrats called it impeachable. When Trump actually bombed a U.S. enemy, Democrats called it inadequate. In both cases, they were pushing Donald Trump in exactly the same direction.

All of it, from Schumer’s TACO attacks to the Democratic Foreign Affairs Committee’s frustration with Delcy Rodriguez to Murphy calling a ceasefire “heartbreaking,” points in the same direction. Not toward restraint, not toward diplomacy, but toward a more complete and more decisive confrontation with American adversaries. Whether that reflects genuine hawkishness, reflexive opposition to anything Trump does, or some complicated mixture of both, the political effect is the same. The liberal opposition party is pushing for more war.

Jeremy Loffredo (X: @loffredojeremy) is an independent journalist and filmmaker who covers foreign policy and war.

The Iran War becomes more senseless, and profoundly more dangerous, with each passing day. This was a war that, as we documented shortly before it began, was never explained to the American people in any meaningful way. That is likely why a large majority have opposed this war from the start, with opposition growing each week. Now, in the war’s sixth full week, we stand on the precipice of dangers unseen for at least two decades.

All of this was not only predictable but explicitly and repeatedly predicted. And this is presumably why Trump’s decade-old vows not to involve the U.S. in any new Middle East wars resonated with so many Americans. Even those who pay minimal attention to American politics understand how often the country has been lied into wars, how every promise made about these wars ends up unfulfilled, and how the country’s energy, resources, and attention are all drained away from American communities and the lives of American citizens, instead filling the coffers of Raytheon and Palantir with one pointless and self-destructive war after the next.

Trump’s threats to completely destroy Iran — not “the regime,” but the country itself and the 93 million people who live there — have been repeated since the start. But they are becoming increasingly psychotic and deranged. In one of the most twisted and morally repugnant statements an American president has ever made — and the bar there is quite high — Trump took to the social media platform he owns this morning to issue this monstrous and definitional vow of genocide:

I am aware that some find this to be a clever and cunning strategy. “Oh, it’s just the Madman Principle,” some say. “Read the Art of the Deal! This is how Trump wins,” say others. “This is Peace Through Strength,” the most Orwellian among us insist, perverting Reagan’s slogan (that massive military build-ups avert wars) into some deceitful formulation whereby war itself is somehow actually peace.

Leaving aside the question of whether Trump actually wrote the “Art of the Deal” book and other questions related to his past success, tactics that are permissible or effective in New York real estate deals and reality-television negotiations are not necessarily permissible or effective in major warfare. I have long maintained that the word “terrorism” has little or no fixed meaning, and thus can be easily manipulated to apply or not apply to anyone or anything. But if the word has any coherent meaning at all, threatening to permanently eradicate “a whole civilization” must be centrally included.

Despite the efforts of some to pretend that Trump’s statement this morning merely constituted a standard threat against Iran’s “regime,” the words he published leave no doubt about his meaning. The word “civilization” does not refer to a government and never has.

The only major “civilization” in Iran is the Persian civilization, which has existed for thousands of years and has produced — and continues to produce — some of humanity’s greatest accomplishments in math, science, art, architecture, politics, law, and more. Beyond that, Trump explicitly said this morning that Iran already has “complete and total regime change where different, smarter and less radical minds prevail,” making it beyond obvious that his threats are not directed at the allegedly “new” and improved Iranian government but — as he put it — at their civilization itself. If you want to defend Trump’s genocidal threat, at least do so based on what he said and meant, not some fabricated, anodyne alternative that is more comfortable.

Beyond all that, this morning’s Trump Social post was far from Trump’s only threat of this sort. That Trump previously threatened to blow up all of Iran’s power plants and bridges —

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During the three years we hosted our live SYSTEM UPDATE program on Rumble, one of our most popular features among our subscribers was our live Q-and-A show each Friday night. We are excited to resume that now that we are back on Substack, starting next Friday night, April 10, at 7:00 p.m. E.T. You can see an example of the segment we did on Rumble here.

The concept for this show is straightforward. Throughout the week, our paid subscribers post questions, comments, critiques and other observations in the comment section of a post designated for that purpose (this post will serve as next Friday’s repository for subscriber contributions). Beginning at 7:00 p.m. E.T. each Friday night, I will address as many questions and comments as I can in as in-depth a manner as possible for roughly 90 minutes to two hours.

Since I began doing journalism more than twenty years ago — I cough and choke as those words come out — I have always believed that the most important innovation of new media and online journalism is the ability to interact with one’s readership. Rather than the decades-old corporate media model of decreeing Truth from a mountaintop in monologue form, being accountable to your audience by not just hearing but also engaging with their questions and critiques is vital. It makes the work for a journalist and commentator both better and more enjoyable.

With this extremely dangerous war in Iran predictably spiraling and escalating as we head into its sixth week — more on that later today or tomorrow — most of our focus will naturally be on that war and its fallout. But our weekly Q-and-A segment will compel attention to other topics that also merit attention, as well as aspects of the war that we may otherwise neglect.

The weekly Q-and-A segment we did at Rumble often sparked the most interesting and insightful discussions we had with our audience. We are excited to replicate that here with our subscribers.

Over the years, Coleman Hughes and I have had several discussions and debates on a wide range of topics. Since October 7, Hughes has become one of the country’s most stalwart and vocal defenders of Israel and U.S. support for it. He was thus a natural fit for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, where he is now a columnist and also hosts an interview program.

Last month, we announced a debate about Iran, Israel, AIPAC and more that had been scheduled for April between the two of us in New York, but that (and the entire debate series of which it was a part) ended up being cancelled by event organizers for various logistical and budgetary reasons. Coleman thus asked if I would come on his program to discuss the topics we had been scheduled to debate. I agreed, and we recorded it on Monday. I think it was a fruitful debate — contentious, to be sure, but also civil and substantive— and you can watch the full show through the player below.

Events in the Iran War are moving quickly. President Trump is clearly attempting to signal to restless bond and oil markets, as well as an increasingly war-opposed American public, that he is aggressively negotiating an end to the war. But that would require both a genuine desire on Trump’s part to end it, as well as the willingness of the Iranians to do so. As thousands of American troops continue to be sent into that region, and with the Israelis hungry for far more war, both of those conditions are very much in doubt.

We will have a new report on the latest war developments either today or tomorrow. For now, here is the full debate I had with Hughes:

All of this has been repeated for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. As early as March 9 — just over a week into the war — President Trump told Americans that “the war is very complete, pretty much.” He added that Iran has “no navy, no communications, they've got no air force. Their missiles are down to a scatter. Their drones are being blown up all over the place, including their manufacturing of drones.”

Since then, Iran has scored numerous successes in striking key targets in the region, including in Israel. Over the past 72 hours, the barrage of Iranian missiles has intensified, while the air defenses of Israel and the Gulf tyrannies continue to erode. Highly potent Iranian missiles landed today in two strategically important Israeli cities, which the government in Jerusalem characterized as “mass-casualty events.” The Strait of Hormuz remains closed under Iranian control.

We presented a live video report and analysis this evening of the Iran War and the key developments over the last two days. Unless Trump simply withdraws amid tenuous declarations of victory — far from the “unconditional surrender” he recently demanded as the sole acceptable outcome — this war is not headed to a quick resolution.

It is, quite predictably, doing the opposite: spiraling, escalating and becoming increasingly dangerous. Everyone wants to believe that their country is winning in every war. Anger is a common reaction to those who suggest this is not the case. But the role of a journalist, or any citizen, is to understand events as they are, not as one wishes them to be.

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Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump administration’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), has spent years warning of the evils of regime-change wars in general and a U.S. war with Iran in particular. When she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019 and 2020, she vehemently condemned who she derided as “neocons” and “warmongers” for tryin…

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On Friday morning, I taped an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program to discuss the ongoing Iran War, growing Israeli influence in the U.S., and proliferating attacks on free speech in the West in the name of shielding that one foreign country from critique. (I presume it will air in the next few days.) Perhaps the most notable part of our conversation was what Tucker told me prior to the cameras rolling.

Tucker said he had learned from several high-placed sources — and he obviously has many within the Trump administration — that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral about him to the DOJ. The subject of the agency’s report of suspected crimes: conversations he allegedly had with Iranian officials and others living in Iran prior to the start of the Trump-Netanyahu war. The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion, or even treason, by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.

Despite how innately shocking this claim is, I had and still have zero doubt that Tucker was telling the truth about what he heard. I have known him for many years, spent much time talking to him both in front of a camera and away from one, and never once has he lied to me or misled me. Tucker has been in public life as a journalist and media figure since his 20s. There have been many harsh criticisms launched against him during those decades, many of which — as he will be the first to tell you — were ones that were quite valid.

Notably, many of the harshest attacks on Tucker came from me during my first decade after becoming a journalist (last year, Tucker discussed our friendship in a podcast conversation with Chris Cuomo and he noted that, during the War on Terror and his ongoing war cheerleading, “nobody was meaner to me than Glenn Greenwald”; Cuomo said the same was true of him).

But it is precisely because I have gotten to know him so well over the past decade or so that I am thoroughly convinced about the authenticity of his epiphanies regarding how lifetime immersion in D.C. culture led him to all sorts of false beliefs; his deeply felt regret and shame about much of what he supported in the past (including but not at all limited to the Iraq War); and the clearly new prism through which he sees the world, clarity enabled by leaving both Fox News and the dual prisons of incestuous D.C. culture and corporate media constraints.

All of that is to say that I harbored zero doubts that Tucker was accurately conveying to me what he had heard. And I also knew this was not just idle low-level D.C. gossip. Tucker’s decades in mainstream media and especially his years as the highest-rated prime-time cable host in the history of the medium — to say nothing of his closeness to key figures in Trump world — have resulted in an array of friends and sources at the highest levels of American power centers. His regular visits to the White House to meet with Trump prove that point.

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But still, the idea that an American journalist of any kind, let alone one of Tucker’s stature, could be surveilled by the CIA and then criminally investigated by the DOJ for treason or related offenses — all for trying to report the truth about an imminent and indescribably dangerous war — is so inherently shocking and unimaginable that I just assumed his sources were hyperbolically sounding an alarm out of caution.

Perhaps that reaction was more wishful thinking than objective analysis. After all, I have lived through many American wars — especially the Iraq War, but others, too — where it was commonplace to equate war criticisms with treason, and journalistic reports at odds with the U.S. Government’s rosy pictures of imminent glorious victory as some sort of anti-American subversion.

Still, the possibility that someone like Tucker could be in serious legal jeopardy for the crime of critical war reporting seemed vanishingly low to me: until I woke up the next day and saw Saturday’s morning tsunami of clearly orchestrated commentary, discourse and pressure campaign from Israelis and their hordes of American loyalists demanding Tucker’s arrest.

Perhaps I was being naive, but I still regard the prospect of Tucker Carlson being charged by the Trump DOJ with felonies for his reporting to be quite low. But the fact that it is being aggressively promoted — not by random accounts online but some of the most influential voices in Washington — is, at the very least, designed to create a climate of fear and intimidation for anyone who has been harshly criticizing both Israel and the Trump-Netanyahu war and, especially, for those reporting that the U.S. government’s triumphalist claims do not correspond with reality.

Hours after we concluded our interview, Tucker on Saturday night published on various social media platforms a five-minute summary of what he had told me. The video, entitled, “We Discovered the CIA Is Reading Our Texts to Frame Us for a Crime,” described how the CIA’s referral to the DOJ is based on private conversations which Tucker, as a journalist, had with people inside Iran.

As Tucker explained, the only way for the U.S. government to have obtained those conversations is through eavesdropping and surveillance on his texts and calls: carried out either by the NSA through domestic surveillance or through use of the Mossad or some other allied spying agency which furnished those conversations to the CIA. One major part of the reporting we did from on the Snowden files detailed how the NSA often used allied spying agencies to snoop on Americans and provide them with the findings, all a way to circumvent constitutional and other legal limits on the ability of American security state agencies to spy on their own citizens.

This is not the first time that the NSA and/or allied agencies have spied on Tucker in his work as a journalist. Both times that he attempted to arrange an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, those conversations were intercepted by US spies

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NOTE FROM GLENN GREENWALD: This article is part of our Outside Voices freelance articles that we publish here. While we edit and fact-check the content to ensure factual accuracy, our publication of an Outside Voices article or op-ed does not necessarily mean we agree with all or even any of the views expressed by the writer, who is guaranteed editorial freedom here. The objective of our Outside Voices page is not only to provide fresh, independent analysis and reporting, but also to provide a platform for young talent and writers outside the gates of corporate journalism to receive exposure for their work and have a venue to develop their independent voice and journalistic skills. In this case, the author, Cole Crystal, was part of our team on our live nightly Rumble program, SYSTEM UPDATE, and continues to work with us on our Substack publications.

Before Operation Epic Fury began, the Trump administration spent very little energy trying to justify the looming war with Iran. The few defenses they did offer were banal platitudes, just echoes of the case for the Iraq War from more than twenty years ago: that Iran was weeks away from obtaining a nuclear device, that their ballistic missile program posed a significant threat to American assets and allies in the region, and that the Iranian people deserved liberation via regime change.

But not long after the bombing began, a new (admittedly more creative) justification emerged online and in the pro-Israel media that war supporters assume will be more persuasive to those doubting the wisdom of yet another Middle East conflict. The war with Iran, we are now told by many, is not really about Iran at all. It is, instead, all about China.

“Some argue Israel dragged the U.S. into war,” a post from The Free Press reads, “But this conflict is bigger than Israel and Iran — it’s about China.” Another article from The Spectator, a British conservative outlet, sang the same tune: “Trump’s ultimate target in this war is China.” Glenn Beck, on March 2, unveiled C.R.I.N.K., or “the new Axis Powers of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” as a way to “understand why Trump attacked Iran.” Fox News’ Jesse Watters told his audience last week that “we are killing two birds with one stone: we stop the number-one sponsor of terror, and we checkmate the Chinese.”

At the very least, if China were really the motive, one would have expected the Trump administration to offer this theory — “this is the chance to counter America’s greatest geopolitical rival” — as a major justification to the American people. One would think they would be particularly motivated to do so, given the consensus of polling data showing that public support for this war is far weaker than for any American war in decades.

But Trump officials never mentioned China as a core motive. In fact, even now, the administration and its backers have hardly mentioned China. This is a theory invented out of whole cloth by Iran-war supporters and/or Trump supporters, grasping for some cogent reason why this new war is in Americans’ interests.

Late last week, Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that this conflict is “a religious war” waged by “radical Islamic terrorists.” On March 2, House Speaker Mike Johnson explained to a group of reporters that the United States “determined, because of the exquisite intelligence that [it] had, that if Israel fired on Iran,” then “[Iran] would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets.” Therefore, the House Speaker insisted, because the U.S. would be attacked either way, it had to hit Iran with Israel. President Trump announced on Friday that the U.S. intends to select “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” for the Iranian people, in order to make their country “economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”

These politicians, and many more inside and around the administration, are not talking about China. It has not been cited as a significant motivator for starting this war. Yet if China is really the reason, did the most prominent war supporters simply forget why they went to war, or did they decide it was best to present a false, pretextual case to the American people about why this war was necessary?

Admittedly, this new justification is, at least on the surface, cogent, even if pretextual. China is the most powerful geopolitical competitor to the U.S. No other country buys more sanctioned crude oil from the Iranians, and only Russia has worked more closely with Iran to beef up its military. In 2021, Iran signed a 25-year partnership with China that would reportedly bring $400 billion to Iran’s energy industry. Various weapons deals between the two countries have been reported in recent years, including one to purchase Chinese supersonic missiles that can sink American ships.

Still, none of these events really pertain to, let alone prove, this new claim — that this war with Iran is somehow really about China. At most, they suggest that China may be negatively affected, losing access to cheap oil and its investments. If simply being negatively impacted by this war is the standard for it being “about” another country, then this war is also about Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the rest of the Middle East.

Indeed, many countries could be harmed by the Trump-Netanyahu war in Iran. Japan’s economy could face severe consequences if oil is trapped in the Strait of Hormuz. The South Korean economy last week erased nearly half a trillion dollars, marking the largest drop in their stock market’s 46-year history. Is the war about both of these East Asian countries as well?

Further complicating this point is that China has not exclusively invested in or done business with Iran. Indeed, the People’s Republic has, at least publicly, invested more in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. (That aforementioned $400 billion agreement between Beijing and Tehran still has not materialized.)

Nor is China the largest buyer only of Iran’s oil. It is also often the leading export destination for Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Omani, Saudi, and Qatari crude. Chinese money, in all its forms, is present across the Middle East, from port construction to the telecommunications industry. What’s more, the Chinese are filling gaps that have opened as a result of American reluctance or negligence.

American foreign policy in the Middle East, including wars, has far more often boosted Chinese interests than undermined them. When the United States in the mid-2010s refused to sell MQ-9 Reaper drones to the Saudis and Emiratis, China filled the gap by selling its CH-4 Rainbow and GJ-1 Wing Loong II models. After the United States invaded Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people, the Chinese were still the first to secure foreign contracts. (To this day, the Chinese are a dominant player in Iraq’s oil industry.) President Biden’s poor relations with the Saudis reportedly played a role in their consideration of settling contracts in Chinese yuan.

One would be forgiven for thinking that many of China’s relationships exist not because of an ideological competition with the U.S., but because capricious or draconian American policy often creates the conditions for Chinese success. This is no less true with Iran, as even the articles proffering this all-about-China theory acknowledge.

“Squeezed by decades of American sanctions and increasingly isolated,” the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur writes in The Free Press, “Iran turned to China as its economic lifeline.” This lifeline, moreover, “[is] the main reason the Islamic Republic has not gone bankrupt,” according to the conservative Hudson Institute, which is also pushing this about-China theory for the Iran war (see, for instance, its article titled, “The Iran Strike Is All About China”). In other words, the U.S. — not the Chinese — created the conditions for a competitor’s presence in the Middle East.

Theories like this one raise another problem. All of these arguments struggle to provide a comprehensive explanation of how China will be “devastated” by regime change in Iran, but they paint a fairly clear picture of how Iran became dependent on the People’s Republic. Of course, the U.S. gaining total control of the Middle East has implications for Chinese commerce and strategy, as these articles acknowledge. But no serious journalists or scholars have argued that China can currently project military power across the globe, with or without Iran.

Is that not why many of these ideologically aligned institutions warn about China’s nascent, but developing, blue-water navy? If one believes China will one day ‘imperialize’ like the U.S., Americans can wrest the Panama Canal from Chinese companies, attack China’s allies, and encircle the Chinese mainland — for now. Those kinds of actions could very well devastate China. (It would not be the first time Western powers have done something like it.) But Iran is hardly a necessary component of said devastation. If the U.S. really wants to wreck China, it does not need to pulverize Persia.

On top of all this, many of the videos and articles that have virally promoted this claim — that this war is about China, not Iran — seem to ignore the very foreign policy establishment that gave them this war. Mainstream American scholarship on China has been fairly clear: from a strategic perspective, the Chinese are perfectly happy to allow the United States to remain entangled in the Middle East because, by definition, it delays an American “pivot to Asia.” Bizarrely, some of these articles acknowledge this, making the Orwellian argument that the U.S. has to go to war with Iran in order to stop going to war in the Middle East.

And, of course, it would be difficult to ignore the lowest-hanging fruit. Far and away the most common thread that exists between those promoting this all-about-China theory is a devotion to Israel: the Free Press, the Hudson Institute, the Spectator, Fox News, etc. All of these institutions constitute the pro-Israel establishment in the U.S. and U.K. So, when Haviv Rettig Gur writes that Marco Rubio “struggled to explain” why the U.S. was at war with Iran, it is not because Rubio denied that Israel forced America’s hand. He, in fact, confirmed that Israel had compelled an American strike.

Here is the clip in question, which the administration has since tried to walk back:

Apart from various reports that confirm Rubio’s initial account, such as in the New York Times and the Financial Times, Antony Blinken (his predecessor) recently described an identical story: that the Israelis tried to pressure former President Obama into war with Iran by claiming that if he failed to act, they would strike Iran alone. But, according to Rettig Gur, “It’s hard to take [Rubio’s] explanation at face value,” so the Secretary of State’s candor can be disregarded for another, entirely dreamed up claim. Rettig Gur continues, “If the trigger was simply an Israeli strike, America could have told the Israelis to sit tight. … Goodness knows the U.S. has the leverage to do it again.” That statement seems highly accurate. Unfortunately, some unclear entity — most likely China — prevented the United States from doing that.

Altogether, the claim that Trump went to war with Iran to fight China is more sensational than substantive. It entertains theories of 4D Chess when Yahtzee is a more apt comparison. The Trump administration is rolling the dice for Israel: it has already financed their genocide in Gaza, vaporized prayer circles in Yemen, destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities, granted Benjamin Netanyahu’s wildest wishes, and is now officially at war with Iran. For any hawks eager to embroil the United States in a head-to-head clash with the People’s Republic, the question is not if this latest war was about China — it is whether any of them will be.

Cole Crystal (@colecrystal) was producer and editor for SYSTEM UPDATE with Glenn Greenwald and now has the same title for this Substack. Before joining, he worked for media outlets in the United States. He graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in government and online social movements.

Every new war that the U.S. wages — at least over the past six decades — is accompanied by a series of official lies, shifting and inconsistent claims about the war’s goals, and constant exaggerations about the grand progress toward glorious victory. Now, a full week into the Iran War started by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his partner, the American President Donald Trump, this war already equals, if not surpasses, the brazen war propaganda that instigated and fueled those prior ones.

For the first few days, Trump’s most loyal supporters insisted — over and over — that this was not even a war at all. Americans have been so accustomed to a state of constant, endless war that when some watch their government heavily bombing another country, deliberately killing its leaders, sinking its navy, all while the U.S. President warns that “bombs will be dropping everywhere,” this somehow does not count as a “war.” We are told by supporters of the Iran War that whatever Iran has been doing to the U.S. constitutes a vicious, 47-year terrorist war against the U.S., but when the U.S. sends a “massive armada” to Iran and then attacks it with aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and 2,000-pound bombs, that this is somehow not a war? O.K.

That insulting not-a-war propaganda was crushed, thankfully, by a rather large obstacle. Namely, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth began calling it a war and invoking war clichés virtually from the start. Israel has always described it as a war. And now President Trump is also calling it a war. That ought to end this rhetorical tactic among all but the most shamelessly dishonest.

Once that defensive wall fell, defenders of this new Netanyahu-Trump war resorted to a new rationale: Fine, it is a war. But it will be a very short one. It will not be like Iraq. Donald Trump is not George W. Bush.

One problem for this rationalization is that this is more or less exactly what Bush 43’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on February 7, 2003, less than a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, when he was asked at a press conference how long he thought the war would last:

Supporters of the new Iran War have a response to this as well. This new war, they insist, is completely different from prior wars, including the Iraq War. They insist on this distinction even though most of the people who sold the Iraq War in 2002-3 are selling this new war now, based on the same exact scripts they used then (we examined yesterday how Fox News exhumed key Iraq War architect and saleswoman Condoleezza Rice from whatever underground lair in which she lurks these days, all to cheer Trump’s new Iran War based on the same exact claims she used to sell the Iraq War, all as Fox News assumed the war cheerleader role yet again).

War defenders argue that this time we are not there for regime change or nation-building. One problem with that claim is that the war was sold from the start based on the need to rid the Iranians of their murderous, tyrannical regime and liberate them. During his middle-of-the-night war announcement on Truth Social, Trump told Iranians: “[The] hour of your freedom is at hand.” If this war is not a regime-change war, then how would it possibly liberate Iranians?

The evidence is now overwhelming that it was a U.S. airstrike — likely guided and governed by Anthropic’s A.I. — that bombed that elementary school on the second day of the war, “liberating” 150 Iranian school girls (from life). But that is not the type of liberation that was promised by those who instigated this war. That could come only from regime change and the building of freedom and democracy.

But on Friday, this war defense — this is not a regime-change war or nation-building — ran into a much larger problem. Trump himself explicitly stated that the supreme goal and aim of the war he started is regime change, followed by nation-building. He also made clear he does not care how long it takes to achieve this: weeks, months, or even longer if necessary. Here is what the President posted on Truth Social about this:

To summarize: there is no end to this new war with Iran absent “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”. The last time the U.S. obtained that was when it dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945.

Trump quickly added — not for the first time — that he must have a key role in approving Iran’s new leaders (yesterday, he vetoed the possibility of the Shah of Iran’s son parachuting into Iran, a country he has not visited for 45 years, in order to rule). Trump then explained the plan of the U.S. and regional allies (meaning Persian Gulf dictators) is to “work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of disaster” and “make it economically bigger and stronger than ever before.”

In sum, Trump said, the U.S. will “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” Trump deserves credit for calling his movement by the right acronym — MIGA — though it seems clear that the “I” stands for a different foreign country. As Trump himself put it during one of the 2024 campaign events organized by his Israeli-American billionaire donor, Miriam Adelson:

But how about the core, defining promise of Trump to Make America Great Again? Trump seems to be struggling more and more with that pledge. In an interview with TIME Magazine today, Trump said that his new war in Iran would likely result in more American deaths, including at home (the evidence is now strong that the horrific shooting last week at a bar in Austin, Texas — which killed three Americans and wounded more than a dozen — was motivated by a desire for retaliation for the U.S. attacking Iran).

Trump also stressed on Friday that he is open to ordering American ground troops to invade Iran, and that this war can only end with a new government in Tehran that is acceptable to Trump. As TIME put it:

In his interview with TIME, Trump says his goals are to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat once and for all, to dismantle its ballistic-missile program, and to install a Western-friendly government. “We have to be able to deal with sane and rational people,” he says. Yet Trump launched a war before making a case to the country or to Congress, and his Administration has offered unclear — and at times contradictory — explanations of the mission’s objectives. The most unnerving possibility is that Operation Epic Fury is not the culmination of his shift toward a war presidency, but rather the beginning of a new chapter . . . .

If the regime endures, or violently suppresses unrest again, the U.S. could face a decision it has tried to avoid: whether to send in ground forces to finish the job.

Trump has not ruled out that possibility. He has said he believes the objectives of the campaign could be achieved within four or five weeks, though he concedes the timeline could stretch longer. The war will continue, he suggests, until those objectives are accomplished. “I have no time limits on anything,” he says. “I want to get it done.”

Trump also found the time to be interviewed by CNN, and he made similar claims to that outlet. Trump said he does not care if Iranians enjoy freedom or democracy. Rather, “he’s looking for new leadership that will treat the United States and Israel well, even if that’s a religious leader and it’s not a democratic state.” This, of course, was exactly the objective when the CIA overthrew Iran’s elected president in 1953 and then spent twenty-five years financing, protecting, and propping up this tyrannical, savage, U.S./Israel puppet regime.

The rage among Iranians from this U.S. interference and imposition of dictatorship is what led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and decades of seething hatred for the U.S. Apparently, the Trump administration — or, more accurately, Netanyahu — decided that this was a good model to replicate.

Trump’s grandiose visions about the scope of this war and its regime-change goals come as Americans are increasingly suffering economically, both prior to the war and increasingly as a result of the war itself. Even leaving aside the $50 billion (at minimum) that the Congressional GOP and White House want to pay for just the couple of weeks of this war, these headlines from today’s New York Times illustrate what is happening to Americans while Trump pursues his new joint U.S./Israel Middle East war:

As should be expected (as is completely understandable), Israel’s most extreme loyalists — including those who never wanted Trump to win in large part due to their belief that Marco Rubio or Ron DeSantis would better serve Israel — are now heaping effusive praise on Trump as the greatest President in decades, if not ever.

If that point needed any greater clarity, nobody was happier about Trump’s regime-change announcement for Iran than Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), whose sole dream appears to be to send Americans into one foreign country after the next to bomb, kill, invade, and overthrow.

For a long time, Graham was supposedly anathema to the America First movement, the embodiment of the D.C. warmongers Trump so flamboyantly vowed to vanquish. But that was before the second term of the Trump presidency became the presidency of Ben Shapiro, AIPAC, Palantir, Netanyahu, and those exact D.C. warmongers whom Trump and MAGA long insisted they loathed.

This article was published this morning in Brazil’s Folha de S.Paulo, the country’s largest newspaper, where I am a columnist. It has been translated to English from its original Portuguese, and reformatted where necessary for re-publication on Substack. To read the original, you can find the link here.

For decades in the United States, absolute support for Israel was an unbreakable bipartisan consensus. The only argument about Israel in U.S. presidential elections has been when one candidate boasts that they are more pro-Israel than the other.

That the U.S. must always finance, arm, diplomatically protect, and even deploy its own soldiers to fight for Israel was affirmed by former President Barack Obama (who fed Israel weapons to bomb Gaza in 2014 and agreed in 2016 to give Israel $38 billion over 10 years), as well as Joe Biden and Donald Trump (who financed and armed Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the October 7 attack).

Last year, Trump joined Israel in bombing Iran. And now Trump, with Israel, has launched a highly dangerous regional war against Iran that both The New York Times and The Financial Times are accurately describing as a war for Israel.

Already, both countries are relentlessly bombing Tehran and other cities, killing at least hundreds of the same Iranian civilians they claim to want to “liberate.” The U.S. is on its way to doing to Iran what it did to Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya: not liberating it, but destroying it.

For more than fifty years, prominent Americans were petrified to criticize Israel or question American devotion to it because of guaranteed reputational destruction. Powerful pro-Israel groups would instantly accuse anyone questioning Israel of anti-Semitism. That worked.

But all of that has changed over the last two-plus years, especially among younger Americans. They have, for the first time, seen the true face of Israel and U.S. devotion to that country. They hate what they see. And support for Israel in the U.S. has now collapsed.

Every demographic group except for conservatives over 50 has now turned against Israel. That once-unthinkable shift is reflected by the vehement opposition to U.S. support for Israel’s wars from leading American conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and (before he was assassinated) Charlie Kirk.

So extreme is this collapse that the most recent Gallup data, as reported by The Financial Times this month, shows that “more Americans sympathise with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time since Gallup began tracking the sentiment.” A recent

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With the war in Iran rapidly expanding into a full-on and increasingly dangerous regional conflagration, I had the opportunity to debate this new war with former IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus. I usually avoid panel discussions at all costs, but when I learned that he would be there — along with former U.S. General and State Department Assistant Secretary of State Mark Kimmitt, Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks, and an Iranian regime-change activist and former Ontario legislator — I immediately said yes. And I’m glad I did.

We produced a video for you where I explain the key passages from that debate and show them to you. Before we began, Morgan interviewed former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who not only voted for the Iraq War and advocated for it for years, but to this day believes it was the right thing to do. Pence also supported President Obama’s disastrous war in Libya, the 20-year war in Afghanistan, and essentially every other war the U.S. has fought or anyone has proposed for the U.S. to fight over the last twenty-five years. What was most striking, as I document, is that Pence — like most current war supporters, especially on Fox News — does not even pretend that he has changed the script he used to sell the American public previous American debacles, including the war in Iraq.

One of the segments I think is most notable is when I asked the former IDF spokesman whether Israel builds its key military and intelligence command headquarters smack-dab in the middle of civilian buildings in the heart of Tel Aviv. My exchanges with General Kimmitt were similarly revealing. The full program, for those who want to watch it, can be seen here. My commentary and analysis are below:

For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neoconservatives have dreamed of only one foreign policy goal: having the United States fight a regime-change war against Iran. With the Oval Office occupied by Donald Trump — who campaigned for a full decade on a vow to end regime-change wars and vanquish neoconservatism — their goal has finally been realized.

Early Saturday morning, the United States and Israel began a massive bombing campaign of Tehran and other Iranian cities. President Trump posted an eight-minute speech to social media purporting to justify his new war, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.” Trump’ war cry was filled with the same slogans and clichés about Iran that Americans have heard from the carousel of bipartisan neocons dominating U.S. foreign policy for decades: Iran is a state sponsor of “terror”; it is pursuing nuclear weapons; it took American hostages forty-seven years ago (in 1979); it repressed and kills its dissidents, etc.

As if to underscore how fully he was embracing the very foreign policy dogma he vowed to reject, Trump invoked the Marvel-like “Axis of Evil” formulation that White House speechwriter David Frum wrote for George W. Bush at the start of the War on Terror. Iran’s government, President Trump proclaimed, is one determined to “practice evil.” This is how Bush — speaking of Iraq, Iran and North Korea — put it in his 2002 State of the Union address: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil.”

Trump left no doubt about the scope and ambition of his new war. This will not be a quick or targeted bombing run against a few nuclear sites, as Trump ordered last June as part of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran. There is nothing remotely constrained or targeted about any of this. Instead, this new war is what Trump called a “massive and ongoing” mission of destruction and regime-change, launched in the heart of the Middle East, against a country of 93 million people: almost four times the size of Iraq’s population when the U.S. launched that regime change war back in 2003.

That Trump claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last June — just eight months ago — was not something he meaningfully acknowledged in his new war announcement, other than to vaguely assert that Iran somehow resumed their nuclear program. In fact, Trump seemed to delight in repeating the same triumphalist rhetoric that he used last year when he assured Americans that Iran’s nuclear program could no longer pose a threat as a result of Trump’s triumphant Operation Midnight Hammer.

In lieu of outlining any clear mission statement for this new war, let alone a cogent exit strategy, Trump offered a laundry list of flamboyantly violent vows. The U.S. will “totally obliterate” Iran’s ballistic missile program (which Iran could not use to reach the American homeland but which Trump admitted last June caused Israel “to get hit very hard” in retaliation). Trump also promised that the U.S. would “annihilate” Iran’s navy. And he told Iranians: “the hour of your freedom is at hand….bombs will be dropping everywhere.”

Trump also attempted to prepare the nation for caskets and body bags of American soldiers returning to the U.S. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost; we may have casualties,” the President said. But, said the man who did everything to avoid military service including during the Vietnam War, mass death of American soldiers “often happens in war.”

In sum, Trump just launched the exact war that most of his MAGA movement professed to oppose. That included one of Trump’s most influential supporters, the late Charlie Kirk, who repeatedly maligned the neocons’ drive for war with Iran as “pathologically insane,” and warned that grave disaster of historic proportions would be the result:

The false claims behind this new war with Iran are ones we have extensively documented. In Trump’s war announcement this morning, he claimed — as he did at Tuesday’s State of the Union address — that Iran refuses to promise that it will not obtain nuclear weapons. The exact opposite is true: Iran has stated this clearly, unequivocally and repeatedly, and did so as recently as this week. “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon,” proclaimed Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi.

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The consequences of this new Trump/Netanyahu war of choice cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty. Already, Iran has launched numerous retaliatory ballistic missiles at Israel, as expected, and has also attacked U.S. military bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait.

But the lack of predictable outcomes is, of course, precisely the point. If the U.S. and Israel succeed in their stated goals of widespread “annihilation” and regime change, then they will create, at the very least, a huge power vacuum in the middle of the world’s most volatile region that will require U.S. resources and a sizable military presence for years if not decades to come. One of the world leaders most responsible for the Iraq War, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, admitted that it was the invasion of Iraq that gave rise to ISIS.

It is hard to overstate what a massive fraud Donald Trump, his campaign and his political movement are. For more than a decade, Trump has ranted and raved against the evils of regime-change wars and neoconservative dogma, only to launch a new war that most perfectly encapsulates and aggressively advances both. He spent years falsely warning that former President Obama would start a war with Iran because of how weak and inept Obama supposedly was at negotiation and diplomacy, only to now do that himself (rather than start a new war with Iran, as Trump predicted, Obama entered a diplomatic agreement with them which major nuclear bodies attested was effective in monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities: a deal which Trump, at Israel’s insistence, tore up in 2018).

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump mercilessly mocked Marco Rubio for receiving millions in donations from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, money that Trump said would “mold [Rubio] into [their] perfect little puppet,” only for himself to become not only the largest beneficiary of Adelson funding in history, but to become the ultimate puppet of the Adelsons’ agenda, one which Trump has clearly acknowledged — when speaking in Israel last year — is an agenda that puts the interests of Israel atop everything, including Americans’ interests:

“I get her in trouble with this, but I actually asked [Miriam] once… ‘What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That might mean Israel,” Trump says, smiling, while looking at the dual Israeli-American national.

And it is not an exaggeration to say — in fact, basic honestly requires one to say — that the 2024 Trump/Vance campaign is one of the most fraudulent political campaigns in American history:

Just one week before the 2024 election, Tulsi Gabbard proclaimed that “a vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney and a vote for war, war and more war.” Conversely, Gabbard said, “a vote for Donald Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them.” Other than immigration, this “no-new-wars” theme was the most central to Trump’s political appeal and his political promises since he emerged on the political scene a decade ago.

One can rehash the decades of now-trite arguments about Iran as much as one wants. But such endless debate cannot alter the facts here that are indisputable and fundamental.

Iran has not attacked and could not have attacked the United States at home. No such attack was even arguably imminent. The new war that Trump just started with Israel is thus the definitive war of choice.

In contrast to the lie-driven 18-month public campaign of Bush and Cheney to convince the American public to support an invasion of Iraq, there has been virtually no attempt made, as I documented this week, to even explain to the American public why a new war with Iran is necessary or desirable. There has been no Congressional approval sought let alone obtained, notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution’s exclusive assignment of war-making powers to the Congress.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell highlighted the dangerous insanity of war propaganda with this leading example: “WAR IR PEACE.” Yet that is precisely the rationale invoked by various Trump supporters to somehow depict this new war as aligned with Trump’s vows of peace (starting massive new wars is merely “peace through strength”).

This is, obviously, the war that Israel and Trump’s largest Israel-loyal donors most wanted and have long been pressuring him to start. Pro-Israel billionaires like Bill Ackman, long-time pro-Israel warmongers like Lindsey Graham, and Israel First activists like Mark Levin are of course already boisterously celebrating this new war against Israel’s primary adversary.

But this is ultimately an American war, one that Trump unilaterally started and for which Trump is responsible. Notably, of course, it is not Trump or his family, but instead everyone else in the world, who will bear the costs and burdens of the war. This was the point Trump famously emphasized shortly before the 2024 election — on November 1 — when explaining why Washington is full of sociopathic warmongers such as Dick and Liz Cheney who constantly start wars in which other people’s families, but never their own, must go fight and die:

As Trump’s senior White House advisor Stephen Miller said about those comments, “warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves.” Indeed they do, Stephen Miller.

Do not expect meaningful opposition from the Democratic Party. Some of them, perhaps most, will make loud noises in protest. But the party’s senior leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), this week urged Trump to make the case to the public about why this war was necessary, whereas Schumer last June mocked Trump for attempting to obtain a peace deal with Iran and accusing him of “chickening out” of the war with Iran that he prosed. Some Democrats, such as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), are effusively praising Trump and his new war.

This new war against Iran is as pure a continuation of the bipartisan DC posture of endless war that has, more than any single cause, destroyed American prosperity, standing, and future over the last six decades at least. The only question how is how many people will die, for how long the damage will endure, and what new unforeseen evils will be created in its wake.

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When President Lyndon B. Johnson decided in 1965 to significantly increase the number of American troops to fight the growing war in Vietnam, he felt obligated to justify this major escalation to the American people (this was from a quaint, obsolete era when Washington believed public support was mildly important for starting or escalating American wars). On April 7 of that year, Johnson went to Johns Hopkins University to present his definitive case for why the U.S. must fight a war on the other side of the world, against a country that had not attacked and could not meaningfully threaten the U.S.

Johnson presented the American war as one of benevolence, selflessness, and a noble desire to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples from a uniquely murderous, tyrannical regime. “Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change,” Johnson proclaimed. He compared American motives in Vietnam to those of the freedom-craving American Founders who waged the Revolutionary War to liberate themselves from the British Crown: ”This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania. It is the principle for which our sons fight tonight in the jungles of Viet-Nam.”

While Johnson invoked some geo-political justifications, he emphasized that the U.S. was deploying and putting at risk tens of thousands of young American soldiers in Vietnam simply because we wanted to help the Vietnamese people be free. “We want nothing for ourselves — only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way,” Johnson said.

Central to this propagandistic narrative was the repeated parading around by the American media of a handful of South Vietnamese activists with deep connections to the West. These camera-ready “natives” assured Americans that the Vietnamese people — on whose behalf they claimed to speak — desperately craved American invasion and bombing of their country in order to liberate them. Individuals like Phan Quang Da, a Harvard-educated physician, and CIA-fronted groups, like The American Friends of Vietnam, were used as battering rams against American opponents of the war to accuse them of being indifferent, even contemptuous, of the desire of the Vietnamese people to have the U.S. military free the population. “The Vietnamese people are asking for this, but you do not care about them,” was the refrain war opponents invariably confronted.

Central to this pro-war campaigning were claims that the Vietnamese enemy did not merely use violence and repression as other bad governments do, but rather engaged in unprecedented, unfathomable, inhuman, and Nazi-like barbarism and savagery rarely seen in human history. An oft-cited book from American pro-war voices was Tom Dooley’s best-selling “Deliver Us From Evil,” which claimed that the North Vietnamese routinely used violence so sadistic and inhumane that only the Nazis could compete with such sadism:

It told of the Viet Minh having partially torn off the ears of several teenagers with pliers and left them dangling—supposedly as punishment for their having listened to the Lord’s Prayer. And he described the Viet Minh taking seven youths out of their classroom and forcing wooden chopsticks through their eardrums…As for the teacher, Dooley claimed the Viet Minh had used pliers to pull out his tongue, as punishment for having taught the religious class.

The consensus of historians is that much, if not all, of the most lurid stories were fabricated. Such inventions were necessary because the CIA and Pentagon understood that Americans could be convinced to support virtually any new war if they believed that the enemy’s crimes were not ordinary but of the greatest historical evil. (This same recognition is what motivated the series of Israeli lies regarding October 7: Hamas beheading babies and cutting them out of wombs to justify Netanyahu’s description of Hamas as “worse than ISIS”; who could possibly oppose or even care about the unleashing of infinite violence against a group that is worse than ISIS?)

And then there was the very orchestrated vilification of those who opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. Such anti-war activists clearly loved and supported the North Vietnamese Communists (if not, why would they oppose a war to remove them from power?). Even worse, American war opponents stood accused of being indifferent to the cries of the Vietnamese people to be rescued and to enjoy the same freedoms that these selfish American war opponents enjoy. Anyone opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam hated not just the Vietnamese people (whom they did not want to bomb and kill) but also hated America itself, since they rejected America’s singular mission to spread freedom and democracy around the world.

To say that the U.S. war in Vietnam helped nobody beyond the U.S. military industrial complex — and that it certainly did not “help” the Vietnamese people — is a drastic understatement. The bloody, savage fighting, bombing, and use of chemical agents meant that “at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.” Chemical agents harmed generations of the Vietnamese people we were told our war would rescue.

And, of course, the U.S. — despite fighting for more than a decade, with 58,000 Americans dead and countless more permanently wounded and scarred — lost the war. Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers proved that the U.S. Government was systematically lying to the public for years about the prospects of victory. And, perhaps worst of all, it was ultimately revealed that the stated 1964 casus belli for the war — that the North Vietnamese had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin — was a complete fabrication, as even the U.S. Naval Institute now documents.

Americans — including a majority of veterans of the war — now overwhelmingly (62%) view U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as a mistake. Indeed, “nearly 3 in 4 (74%) Vietnam veterans say Johnson misled people, while 10% say he was truthful.”

Despite all of this, the same exact propaganda and deceitful tactics used to sell, justify, and glorify that war have been used for selling every new American war since then. As discredited as these war justifications proved to be, those in the American government and media have never changed the script even slightly for subsequent wars: from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, and now the latest ones in Venezuela and Iran.

Two months ago, we were subjected to exactly these tactics to gin up support for the U.S. bombing of boats off the coast of Venezuela. Maduro was an incomparably cruel and repressive tyrant. The U.S. media endlessly featured a handful of carefully selected and homogenized Venezuelan exiles in Miami, who were anointed spokespeople for all Venezuelans actually living in that country, to assuage American voters that the population craves U.S. war. Anyone questioning American war operations thus became “pro-Maduro,” accused of selfishly disregarding the “desire of Venezuelans” to have the U.S. military come to “free” them, etc.

And now the full panoply of these decades-old ploys is raining down upon Americans with more intensity than at any point since the run-up to the Iraq War; indeed, the current campaign to drive the U.S. to full-scale war with Iran seems even more intense than the avalanche of propaganda of 2002 and 2003. As President Trump has ordered the largest military build-up in the Middle East since the Iraq War, all aimed at threatening Iran, Americans are being bashed over the head with the moral imperative of fighting a new American regime-change war (the exact type of war that President Trump was elected to avoid), this time in Iran, a country three times the population of Iraq.

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Iran, just coincidentally, happens to be Israel’s top adversary. Just as coincidentally, having the U.S. go fight a regime-change war in Iran to rid Israel of its main enemy has been the supreme wet dream of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his horde of Israel loyalists in the U.S. going back many decades. Indeed, their plan was to have the U.S. military exploit the fallout from the September 11 attack by marching from Baghdad, once one of Israel’s top enemies was taken care of by the U.S. (Saddam Hussein), onto Tehran.

Because the Iraq War did not exactly work as promised (Americans were not, in fact, welcomed as liberators, and the war was not exactly over in weeks or even years), the U.S. never made it to Iran. But the dream of a U.S. war in Iran has never died among the neocon crew, arguably more empowered now than at any point since the War on Terror glory days.

The U.S. is closer than ever to carrying out the neocons’ primary goal. None of those actual motives for wanting regime-change war in Iran make an appearance in the war propaganda pushing this war. In lieu of those truths about why so many want the Iranian government changed, we have the same series of deceitful claims and manipulative, heart-tugging clichés that have ushered in every American war since at least Vietnam:

The U.S. Just Wants to Help Free the Oppressed Peoples of the World

Although false claims about Iraqi WMDs are understandably most associated with the case for invading Iraq, it is hard to overstate how prominent the claims of humanitarianism and liberation were. In George W. Bush’s address to the nation on the eve of the attack, he echoed, close to verbatim, Lyndon Johnson’s claims about the purity of U.S. motives: “We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

Appearing on Meet the Press earlier that month, Vice President Dick Cheney assured everyone that Iraqis hated Saddam and thus wanted the U.S. to go liberate them. “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Cheney said. “The read is that the vast majority of them would respond favorably to an effort to rid the country of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Groups of pro-war Western liberals issued pompous manifestos denouncing any left-liberal opposition to the war, arguing that war opponents callously disregarded their moral responsibility to support freedom for all people. These left-liberal war advocates for Iraq declared themselves united in the view that the U.S. overthrow of Saddam was “a liberation of the Iraqi people.” The pro-war left-wing journalist Niall Stanage said in an email to The New York Times: “The resistance in Iraq is engaged in a battle to liberate the country,” and added: “The Iraqi resistance deserves the support of the international antiwar movement.”

When President Obama addressed the nation on March 28, 2011 — to explain why the U.S. was joining the U.K. and France in bombing Libya — he assured everyone that the war operations were based not on a desire to control Libyan crude oil (perish the thought), but rather due to “a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves.” Yet again, American selflessness and benevolence toward the world’s oppressed peoples were the driving forces for our wars, as Obama said it was all part of the “broader goal of a Libya that belongs not to a dictator, but to its people.”

Every time the U.S. Government is gearing up for a new war, it assures Americans that the war will free the oppressed peoples of that country from their never-before-seen evil dictators, so everyone can feel good about the bombs falling and the resulting carnage. Indeed, not only will the U.S. war liberate the population, but they themselves know this, and thus desperately want the U.S. military to come and bomb their country and destroy its infrastructure — just like we are told the Vietnamese and Iraqis craved this, and are now hearing that the Iranians are also craving American bombs falling on their cities and towns.

The Proof That We Will Be Seen as Liberators Are These Camera-Friendly Exiles!

In literally every country on earth, you can find citizens who have pure contempt and deep loathing for their government and its leaders. Certainly in the U.S., it is extremely easy to find Americans who not only oppose Trump, but believe his evil and tyranny is on par with Hitler’s. Just last year, millions of them marched in the streets around the country to denounce the U.S. Government as authoritarian and Trump as a fascist.

Most rational people understand that hatred for the government by a large portion of the citizenry does not remotely mean such sentiments are shared by the majority. And virtually everyone understands — rational or not — that one’s ability to find some individuals in a country who claim they speak for a majority in wanting their government deposed is not even close to compelling evidence that this is true. It is a very rare case, if it ever happens, that most people in a country want a foreign power to come bomb and invade them and impose a new government.

Yet when it comes to new American wars, somehow these obvious truths instantly evaporate. Someone sees a Venezuelan living in Miami who says that everyone hates Maduro and wants the U.S. to depose him, and suddenly that becomes proof that the 27 million people who actually live in that country share that sentiment. Rational or not, this propaganda is powerful, which is why the CIA spends so much time, energy, and money on manufacturing pro-war exile groups whom they know the U.S. media will repeatedly and credulously interview as proof that the people in the targeted country are begging for an American invasion and bombing campaign.

The CIA’s “American Friends of Vietnam” was replicated in every country the U.S. has since bombed or invaded, including Venezuela and now Iran. Throughout 2002, neocons propped up someone named Ahmed Chalabi: a career criminal and fraudster whom the CIA re-branded as “the George Washington of Iraq.” Chalabi — despite living in the West and having never set foot in Iraq for decades — was ubiquitous in the American media in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. He was the representative of the Iraqi people — the one who would lead them after Saddam was gone — and he was constantly assuring Americans that Iraqis (with whom he had almost nothing in common) would welcome the U.S. military as liberators. That role for Iran is now being played by the Shah’s son, who has not been to the country for his whole adult life yet proclaims himself ready to lead it.

When it came time for the war on Libya, the U.S. Security State and its media allies paraded around something called the National Transitional Council (NTC), whose leader, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, called for U.S. bombing based on his expectation that with Gaddafi gone, he’d rule Libya. As it turned out, his efforts failed, and nobody ruled Libya as it descended into anarchy, slavery, and ISIS domination once Gaddafi was raped to death on the streets of Tripoli by a savage mob. Behold the inspiring outcome of “American war liberation.”

However one wishes to describe the aftermath of the U.S./France/U.K. bombing of Libya, “liberation” would not be among the appropriate descriptive terms. But at least the war-making leaders who attacked Libya convinced their own population that it was a benevolent mission: all accomplished by parading around selected pro-Western dissidents to assure everyone they spoke for the Libyan people in wanting NATO members to rescue their country with bombs and missiles.

The Targeted Regime Has Committed Unprecedented Atrocities Equal to or Worse Than Hitler

To justify a new U.S. war, it is woefully inadequate to simply allege that the government to be attacked is repressive or even violent. After all, the U.S. has long not only supported but installed and propped up some of the most savage tyrannies on the planet, and still does: from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Rwanda and Uganda. As a result, the evil of the targeted country in the new war must be in a different stratosphere of previously unseen evil — or at least on par with Hitler (or worse) — to justify why the newly targeted regime should be deposed while America’s numerous tyrant friends should not be.

Given the monstrous regimes the U.S. installed and supported throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it was no easy task for President Johnson to claim this about the North Vietnamese. But he knew he had to try; here is how he did it:

It is a war [in Vietnam] of unparalleled brutality. Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks. Large-scale raids are conducted on towns, and terror strikes in the heart of cities.

Much, if not all, of Johnson’s claims of this extreme savagery against Vietnamese innocents proved true, but it was often perpetrated by the U.S. itself.

In the first Gulf War against Iraq, President George H.W. Bush and his top officials repeatedly equated Saddam with Hitler (that the CIA under Bush’s management was in a close alliance with Saddam seemed to be no impediment to this claim). As part of that campaign to equate Saddam with history’s worst monsters, a notorious CIA fraud was perpetrated on the American public, which became some of the most effective war propaganda in the history of that dark art.

A young Kuwaiti, Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ, was called to testify before Congress, where she claimed in detail to have seen Saddam’s soldiers pull babies out of incubators and throw them on the floor. For obvious reasons, those tales of mass infanticide spread immediately all over the world and, as intended, such unspeakable horrors deterred most Americans from even thinking about opposing the war against Iraq. After the war was concluded, all involved admitted that Nayirah lied about literally everything and that none of her claimed horrors actually happened.

Bush 41’s son, George W. Bush, also invoked the necessary tactic in 2003 by arguing that Saddam was not just evil but so far beyond what humans can fathom that such barbarism has rarely been seen in the world:

In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality. Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military -- a final atrocity against his people.

As was true for the war by Bush 41 against Saddam, Bush 43’s war also entailed the rolling out of “experts” to insist that Saddam was no ordinary evil but rather the new Hitler.

All of this should also appear instantly familiar as part of the new campaign to do to Iran what the U.S. had done to all of these other countries. In countless tyrannies throughout the region which the U.S. supports — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, etc. — protesters are indiscriminately gunned down; dissidents are thrown into dungeons; journalists and bloggers are murdered for the slightest critiques of the autocrats. So what justifies leaving those regimes in place while starting a massive, dangerous war to depose the Iranian government?

Given the sheer barbarism of the U.S.’s closest allies in that region, it is quite a difficult task to depict Iran as uniquely repressive. That is why we are now hearing that Iran gunned down 3,000 — 7,000 — 14,000 — 30,000 — 73,000 — 80,000 — 160,000 innocent peaceful protesters, with some even disgustingly claiming that Iran killed more of its own citizens in two weeks than the number of Gazans killed by Israel during its 2+ year daily ritual of indiscriminate slaughter. To justify the new regime-change war against Iran, the evil of the enemy must be of a strain rarely seen in human history.

Those Opposing the New American War Love the Targeted Regime and Hate the People of the Targeted Country

This tactic is so transparent that it hardly requires elaboration. Everyone paying minimal attention to our war debates will instantly recognize it as a universal, reflexive accusatory tactic from war supporters.

If you opposed the Vietnam War, it meant that you loved Ho Chi Minh and were indifferent to the desires of the Vietnamese people for freedom and liberation from Communist tyranny. If you opposed the war in Afghanistan, it meant that you supported the Taliban and did not care about the ability of Afghan women to be educated (a goal of feminist liberation which First Lady Laura Bush assured everyone in a 2001 op-ed was a key aim of the U.S. war against the Taliban).

Opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq made opponents “objectively pro-Saddam,” and they were accused of being sociopathically indifferent to the yearnings of Iraqis to be freed of Saddam’s oppression. Those opposed to bombing Libya were pro-Saddam. Those opposed to Obama’s years-long dirty CIA regime-change war in Syria were pro-Assad. Those opposed to U.S. financing and arming of Ukraine are pro-Putin and contemptuous of the desire of Ukrainians to remain democratic. Opposing U.S. regime change in Venezuela means you love Maduro and hate those craving democracy. And now, of course, opposing a risky, dangerous, protracted regime-change war in Iran makes you an admirer of the mullahs and someone coldly indifferent to Iranians’ cries for freedom (meaning: restoration of the tyrannical reign of the Israeli and American puppet referred to as the Shah and “The Pahlavi Dynasty”).

Polls overwhelmingly show that Americans view virtually every one of these past American debacles as a horrific error. Americans have been making it crystal clear for years now that they do not want more regime-change wars, endless wars, or having the U.S. act as the world’s police. The promise to end such wars was as central to Trump’s electoral victory as any promise other than perhaps his immigration policies. And, consistent with all of that, polls now show an overwhelming majority of Americans in steadfast opposition to new regime-change wars of the kind many are pushing for in Iran:

But when it comes to new American wars, few things matter less than American political opinion. Perhaps the only thing more irrelevant is the view of Congress, notwithstanding the sole and exclusive power to declare new wars assigned to it by Article I of the Constitution.

In fact, very little about public opinion or public debate matters. When the U.S. Government wants a new war, it enlists its partners in the U.S. corporate media to pound Americans over the head with these same war-mongering tactics, narratives, and propaganda that have done so much damage to the U.S. in so many ways over the past seven decades at least.

But enough people are cowed by these tactics — and understandably so: who wants to be accused of being pro-Saddam or pro-Putin or pro-Ayatollah? — for just long enough that the U.S. can launch the new war without substantial popular resistance. By the time the war begins, Americans’ regrets — which are inevitable — are too late to stop it. And no matter how many times these tactics have proven to be deceitful lies and manipulative propaganda, enough pro-war advocates will convince enough people to believe: maybe this is finally the good war, where some of these claims will finally come true?

Once you look for these tactics, you will see them everywhere. And it is hard to recall a time when they were more visible, and being more aggressively pushed, than in the attempt to convince Americans to support a new regime-change war in Iran. There are so many powerful factions, including one specific foreign country, whose interests will be advanced by this war, that the American people — who, as always, will pay the price — are being steamrolled by the same propagandistic rituals as always. The war propagandists do not even respect Americans enough to change the script even slightly.