Fool Me Twice: The Case for War With Iran Is Even Thinner Than It Was for Iraq
· The Intercept
Days before embarking America on another foreign war, Donald Trump spent more than 90 minutes speaking endlessly about America being back during his State of the Union, leveling racist accusations of Somali American fraud, and expounding on the beauty of America’s raid to arrest Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. It was a master class in testing the attention span of Americans hoping to hear anything at all about the danger that has loomed in the background now for months: the threat of armed conflict with Iran. Those who made it to the finale — and who have conscious memories of the George W. Bush years — would have noticed a similar tenor to the State of the Union in 2003, the one which paved the way for the justification of the invasion of Iraq less than two months later.
In that speech, Bush outlined the alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the myriad ways in which Iraq had supposedly deceived international investigators, and the staggering human rights abuses committed by Saddam Hussein against his own countrymen. Secretary of State Colin Powell, the president boasted, would soon outline to the United Nations the threat the United States, and indeed the world, was up against in Baghdad.
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However, while many of the claims made by Bush were spurious at best and outright deceptions at worst, the claims Trump made in his speech were even less believable — and much more scattershot. Trump claimed that Iran would “soon” have intercontinental ballistic missiles that would “reach the United States of America,” that more than 32,000 Iranians had been killed in recent protests (NGOs estimated the number to be much lower, and an Iranian human rights group put the death toll at 6,488), and that the Iranian military had somehow killed “millions,” somewhere in history, with roadside bombs it pioneered. Perhaps most plainly false of all, Trump contended he just wanted the Iranians to say “those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon,’” despite Iranian officials constantly making such insistences.
Before the U.S. and Israeli military launched strikes Saturday, the specter of an Iranian war has become something of a national miasma, the build-up having gone on now so long that its cause is imperceptible, yet perhaps everything at once. The build-up to the Iraq War was similarly argued under many causes, with Saddam’s authoritarian governance very much part of the discussion, but the aftermath of 9/11 and the supposed threat Iraq posed to the homeland was chief among them — the fire that led Americans to line up front and center behind the cause. While Iran has been on the wish list for American neoconservatives and foreign policy wonks for decades, this escalation has happened over a much shorter time frame, much more suddenly, and much more obvious in how the government is desperately in search of a compelling cause.
Stretching back into December, the cards were being laid out. Benjamin Netanyahu had made plans to meet with Trump at the White House to discuss what he saw as the threat posed by Iran’s conventional ballistic missile program, seeking a green light to initiate another devastating war, with hoped-for American support. Israel’s reasoning was not based on Iranian human rights abuses or about threats to the American homeland, but threats to Israel and “U.S. interests,” according to NBC News. Netanyahu had wanted a post-war situation similar to Lebanon’s, where Israel has been able to continue striking that country daily with Hezbollah unable to respond. Iran still retained deterrent military capacity to prevent this from happening. A greater threat, however nonexistent, needed to be communicated.
The rollout of news stories to back up Netanyahu’s claim was well-telegraphed, with reports suddenly emerging in the Israeli press that Iran was planning to use an imminent military exercise as a diversion to strike Israel. At the same time that Netanyahu was meeting with Trump, reports again suddenly emerged that Iran was seeking to develop and purchase “biological and chemical warheads” for its missiles, eerily echoing the false claims Powell made before the U.N. about Iraq.
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As attention shifted to the burgeoning protests in Iran, suddenly the United States and Israel had a much stronger casus belli: supporting anti-government demonstrators to overthrow the government. Only a few days after the protests began, Trump promised the “United States of America will come to their rescue” if the Iranian government killed protesters, “which is their custom.” As the death toll mounted, far exceeding the toll of previous protest movements, the threats of intervention continued but never actually materialized. Western officials brought in Starlink satellites to keep protesters connected (SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk has joked that he supports Secretary of State Marco Rubio becoming the shah of Iran), and unnamed foreign intelligence agencies allegedly brought in firearms used to kill over 200 members of government security forces. Yet Trump continued to promise that he was planning something, saying “help is on the way,” and demanding protesters “take over institutions” even as protests dissipated.
The specter of an Iranian war has become something of a national miasma, the build-up having gone on now so long that its cause is imperceptible, yet everything at once.
Trump wanted war, as did Netanyahu, but there was no conception of when it should happen, for what cause it should exactly be waged, and what would even be done. There was want, but there was no will, and there was no way. Everything had to be cobbled together in the background, sometimes to seemingly even get Trump on board with the plan he himself put into motion.
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Reports of considering strikes on “symbolic military targets” were followed by Trump commending Iran for supposedly halting hundreds of planned executions. Declarations of an “armada” being sent to Iran’s shores were accompanied by demands to stop killing protesters, even though the protests had ceased days earlier. More reports poured in of plans for special ops raids and strikes to assassinate Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (and perhaps also his son), with reports of imminent attacks being just as suddenly thrown out as more and more military assets moved in to allow for greater and greater operations, a build-up not seen since Bush’s full-scale invasion of Iraq 23 years ago.
With attacks underway, the plan now seems to revolve around a complete decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership and the overthrow of the entire system via the air — followed by a populist uprising Trump hopes will topple the regime. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” Trump said in a video address. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
The campaign of airstrikes comes only hours after the United States insisted it wanted to have a civil diplomatic conversation.
Two Iranian women walk past an anti-U.S. mural on the wall of the former U.S. Embassy in downtown Tehran on Feb. 26, 2026, the final day of Iran–U.S. talks in Geneva. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesAs with the diplomatic talks that preceded Iran’s war with Israel in June, these negotiations are set up to fail, and the scope of demands is now far wider and even more contradictory. Reports emanating from the discussions seem to oscillate between a willingness to resurrect some version of the Obama-era nuclear deal and a demand for what amounts to complete capitulation — with Rubio demanding restrictions on ballistic missile range and ending of support to Hamas and Hezbollah; Israel demanding the full dismantling of said ballistic missile arsenal; and Trump plainly stating “no nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that, all the different things you’d want.”
There is also no consensus about what the threat from Iran is even supposed to be in the American imagination. Trump’s accusation of near-imminent ICBM production is a recent invention, clearly meant to steer things in a familiar, concrete direction. But the Trump administration cannot seem to agree on whether or not Iran is even developing its nuclear program at all — with Rubio telling reporters there is no enrichment happening, even as special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that Iran was merely “a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”
Bush administration officials infamously claimed they did not want “the smoking gun” to be “a mushroom cloud,” but officials had always kept that estimate in months — the way the threat of Iran making a nuclear bomb has often been phrased as “months away” for the better part of two decades. Now, the threat is somehow both days away and barely off the ground.
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While opposition figures like Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah, as well as Mojahedin-e-Khalq leader Maryam Rajavi, have jostled for the attention of Trump’s circle, there seems to be little attention paid to their efforts, with the president dismissing Pahlavi as “very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country.” Those who remember Ahmed Chalabi and the motley crew of Iraqi opposition cronies may rest easy, as there seems to be little care at all about what would even come next. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the brewing war’s strongest supporters, scorned the idea of even considering the day after in an interview with an Emirati newspaper, saying: “You gotta quit saying we. It’s not we, it’s them. It’s not my job to construct a new Iran. It’s my job to give them the opportunity to construct a new Iran.”
The feeling at home, despite oversaturation in the media, could not be more different than it was before Iraq. Just before the bombs fell, 64 percent of the country supported the invasion; more than two decades later, only 21 percent of Americans currently favor an attack on Iran, with only 40 percent of Republicans supporting it. The Trump administration is apparently so concerned about the optics of the scenario they have walked themselves into that, according to reporting from Politico, officials were hoping Israel would attack Iran first, leading Iran to attack American troops, thereby rallying the country behind the war effort after the fact.
There is no consensus about what the threat from Iran is even supposed to be in the American imagination.
One would think that such a drive toward an unpopular war-in-the-making would galvanize Democrats, but so far, anti-war voices have been limited. Lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna have found themselves drowned out by demands from Democratic leaders that the Trump administration simply provide a clear explanation, apparently seeking to avoid the embarrassment of pundits and politicians after the disaster of Iraq, who blamed their initial support on buying the Bush administration’s flimsy case.
It is an unshakeable belief that consistency of logic is the primary issue with a war to cement Israel’s military hegemony, one that may cost thousands of lives. While some prominent progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders attempted to hamper Trump’s funding to execute the war without congressional approval in June, Sanders has not made any public comments on the march to war in over a month, and other progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who have also supported anti-war initiatives, were seen applauding as Trump railed against Iran this week at the State of the Union.
The world is now watching a devastating war rage with no real reasoning, already no end in sight, and its chief belligerent making promises it cannot keep to a population it will surely massacre in the process. Unpopularity has not stopped the Trump administration before, whether it be in Venezuela or in Minneapolis, but the United States finds itself in a uniquely baffling position, where its opposition party, much like how it goes in Israel, instead begs for a better execution of the government’s evil plan.
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