On March 31, the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush departed naval station Norfolk in Virginia, bound for the Middle East to join the other three carriers (USS Lincoln, Tripoli and New Orleans) as American and Israeli air strikes against Iran enter their second month.  The name alone forces us to reckon with two legacies bequeathed by the George W. Bush administration nearly a quarter century ago.

The 41st president, George H.W. Bush, fought a war in the same region in 1991. He drove Iraq out of Kuwait and then stopped. His national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, explained the logic: ‘It was the first conflict after the Cold War, and we wanted to establish rules’.  As such, the coalition was multinational, its objectives limited, and there was a clear exit plan. The elder Bush understood that invading Baghdad would shatter the regional order and entangle the US in a bottomless occupation. The difference between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. was strategic humility, the father knew when to stop.

His son’s administration rejected that restraint. The neoconservatives, who dominated the Pentagon and the White House after 9/11 believed the US could use force to remake the Middle East, and their project left us with two enduring concepts that still shape American military power and politics today: creative chaos and strategic deception. These are the intellectual doctrines of neoconservatism, an ideology that bears constant re-examination.

Legacy One: Creative chaos

The intellectual architect of creative chaos was Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In 2002, he wrote: “Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day…They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission”.

This worldview had already been incubating for years.  In 1998, the Project for the New American Century, (PNAC)-whose signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and John Bolton- sent a letter to president Clinton insisting that ‘removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power… now needs to be the aim of American foreign policy’.  The letter was written three years before 9/11 and before any claims about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.  After the attacks, these men moved into the highest ranks of the Bush administration, and the invasion of Iraq was sold to the American public and the rest of the world as a mission to eliminate WMDs and spread democracy.

“Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day…They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission”.

“Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day…They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission”.

In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney famously predicted that American forces would be ‘greeted as liberators.’ Instead, Iraq descended into sectarian slaughter and gave birth to the nightmare of ISIS. Today, a new generation of the same pundits has sold Trump the identical delusion: that Iranians will welcome foreign intervention with roses.  In reality, the defiant crowds filling the streets of Tehran today tell a different story—one of unanimity and fierce resistance to American/ Israeli aggression.

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Legacy Two:  Strategic deception

If creative chaos was the ideology, strategic deception was its tool. In late 2001, the Pentagon created the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). Its purpose was to shape public opinion abroad, especially in western Europe and the Middle East. But when the New York Times reported on the office in February 2002, the details were explosive: OSI had proposed providing “news items, possibly even false ones’, to foreign media. Critics deemed it Orwellian, and called on Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to put an end to this ‘misguided experiment in news manipulation”.

The political fallout quickly followed.  On 26th February 2002, Rumsfeld dropped the mask: “I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to salvage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse”, he told reporters. “There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have. That was intended to be done by that office is being done by that office, NOT by that office, in other ways”.

The Office of Strategic Information was closed in 2002, its name was buried, but its functions and expertise were quietly shifted elsewhere.  And this was a dark preview of things to come over the following decade.  In 2011, the Pentagon issued a Joint Publication 3-05, which formally replaced “Psychological Operations” (PSYOP) with “Military Information Support Operations” (MISO). The rebranding was deliberate, but the mission was the same: “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organisations, groups, and individuals”.

Once Trump landed in the White House, the scandalous “false items” of 2002 had evolved into the “alternative facts” of 2017. The machinery of strategic deception, originally designed to plant false stories and coerce journalists, is now a standard component of American power, permanently entrenched and unchallenged.

 Once Trump landed in the White House, the scandalous “false items” of 2002 had evolved into the “alternative facts” of 2017. The machinery of strategic deception, originally designed to plant false stories and coerce journalists, is now a standard component of American power, permanently entrenched and unchallenged.

 Once Trump landed in the White House, the scandalous “false items” of 2002 had evolved into the “alternative facts” of 2017. The machinery of strategic deception, originally designed to plant false stories and coerce journalists, is now a standard component of American power, permanently entrenched and unchallenged.

In the latest twist of this story, in May 2025, the Army inactivated the 1st Information Operations, the heir to the Office of Strategic Information, and transitioned its capabilities into the newly created “Theatre Information Advantage Detachments” (TIADs) a theatre-based information superiority units, with the task of preparing the military for “multi-domain operations” by 2030. This shift prioritises embedding electronic warfare, cyber, and psychological operations directly into manoeuvre units to better face peer adversaries.  In effect, the machinery of deception becomes increasingly opaque, blending seamlessly into the official narrative.

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Weaving the two legacies:

Taken together, these forces of chaos and deception sustain a state of permanent conflict while providing the perfect cover for Trump’s erratic utterances. His incoherence becomes the necessary façade for a political landscape that no longer answers to the truth.

And the neoconservatives who championed these ideas were never voted out of influence. Many of them- Bolton, Perle, Wolfowitz- remain active voices in foreign policy debates. Their institutions and think tanks- the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and others, continue to staff administration and shape doctrine.  The OSI was dismantled only in name, but its DNA lived on in the MISO, and now their manuals are ironically carried on the warship named after a president who believed in limits.  George H.W. Bush understood that war should have a clear objective and an exit, that the Middle East does not yield to transformational schemes, and that truthfulness is the foundation for legitimacy.

The USS George H.W. Bush, is now steaming toward Iran, expected to arrive in late April.  It is a formidable vessel- over a thousand feet long, carrying more than 6000 sailors and marines, its fighter jets capable of striking targets across the region. But besides embodying American fire power, it is also telling us something else:   The era of the alleged ‘liberator’ has given way to the age of “alternative facts”, where reality is whatever the King of Chaos says it is.  And The Bush, far from projecting strength, risks being witness to the slow decline of an empire that mistook chaos for control.

And the neoconservatives who championed these ideas were never voted out of influence. Many of them- Bolton, Perle, Wolfowitz- remain active voices in foreign policy debates. Their institutions and think tanks- the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and others, continue to staff administration and shape doctrine.

In this light, Trump’s address on 1st April, 2026 functioned as an exercise in rhetorical muddling, where the deliberate use of contradictory signals served to pre-empt any narrative of a strategic fiasco. By simultaneously claiming ‘core strategic objectives are nearing completion’, while vowing to bring Iran ‘back to the Stone Age, where they belong,’ he constructs a ‘creative chaos’ that masks the absence of a definitive exit strategy.

For a leader whose persona hinges on the optics of ‘overwhelming victory,’ admitting to the reality of failure would constitute a profound public humiliation. By retreating into this blend of ‘decisive success’ and looming escalation, Trump ensures that the benchmarks of success remain fluid—preserving the image of the ‘winner’  even as the geopolitical reality spins dangerously out of control.

The sobering reality is when success is redefined as whatever the leader says it is, the truth becomes the first casualty of ‘winning’.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

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