Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.

What we have here is an illegal, unnecessary war wrapped in a strategic fiasco inside a huge cover-up.

At any other time in our history, the scope and scale of this would generate a scandal, major congressional hearings, and, in the end, result in the likely firing of the Secretary of Defense. Senior military officers, should they be found to have aided and abetted in the cover-up, would also be forced out of their jobs.

A major new story in the Washington Post headlined, “Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show,” reveals yet another dimension of Trump and Hegseth’s efforts to lie about just how disastrous their ill-considered war of whim has been. The Post conducted an independent analysis of publicly available satellite imagery and found it contained evidence that Iran has “damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began.” It goes on to assert, “The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.”

These revelations alone would be enough to trigger outrage at any other time in history. But they are noteworthy not because they reveal an aberration in how the administration has communicated about the war to Congress and the American people, but because they are so consistent with other administration efforts to mislead about the war.

The war, of course, began........

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