CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Pete Hegseth’s Epic Fury

Hegesth press briefing on Iran war. Screengrab from video posted to X.

It wasn’t long into Pete Hegseth’s Monday morning press briefing that I got the feeling he might reach through the screen, grab my throat, and declare war not just on Iran, but me too.

To be fair to our self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” Monday mornings can be a bear. And Hegseth was facing a particularly unenviable one.

Over the weekend, Hegseth’s boss, President Donald Trump, launched a war on Iran via a pre-recorded video filmed from the comfort of his Florida redoubt, Mar-a-Lago. (Trump didn’t let the imminent war interrupt his million-dollar-a-head Saturday night fundraiser.)

Not ready to face a barrage of reporters’ questions about his evolving justifications for war, Trump offered up his defense secretary.

So Monday morning, game face on, Hegseth did his best to explain to a skeptical country why we were — at Israel’s prompting — diving headfirst into another Middle East regime-change war; the very thing Trump railed against on the campaign trail.

Standing before a bank of cameras, Hegseth looked well-coiffed (he didn’t install a makeup studio in the Pentagon for nothing!), but also angry — which is not the disposition you hope for in someone atop the world’s greatest killing machine. Operation Epic Fury was, I thought, an apt descriptor not just for our new war, but Hegseth’s mood.

Heavy on fervor, Hegseth’s briefing lacked basic facts and context.

For 47 years, Hegseth began, Iran’s “death cult” has........

© CounterPunch