CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Deception Behind Trump’s War on Iran

Americans have seen this pattern before. A president moves toward war. Intelligence is stretched. Foreign allies make the hardest push. Friendly media turn selective images into political permission. Then ordinary people pay the price.

That is why the debate over Trump’s attack on Iran should not be reduced to one man’s impulse. It was meant to deceive. On one side was a long-running campaign by Benjamin Netanyahu to frame Iran as a problem to be solved militarily, not diplomatically. On the other was an information ecosystem that tried to present military escalation as if it were a gift to the Iranian people. Even one of the key public claims used to justify confrontation looked shaky: Reuters reported that Trump’s assertion that Iran would soon have missiles capable of hitting the United States was not backed by U.S. intelligence.

Netanyahu’s role was not incidental. Axios reported that a Feb. 23 phone call from the Israeli prime minister gave Trump what it described as a pivotal intelligence prompt for war: a tip that Iran’s top leadership would be gathered in one place and could be hit at once. Later, a report summarized by The Times of Israel said, citing The New York Times, that some of Netanyahu’s broader predictions — that Iran would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz, strike neighboring targets effectively or withstand the political shock — were dismissed by senior Trump aides as “farcical.” Americans should recognize that word.........

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