The Iran war is not a religious war — stop making it out to be one

Back in 2007, as my unit was training to deploy to Iraq, a movie came out that galvanized my fellow Marines. The movie was “300,” an adaptation of a comic book about the Battle of Thermopylae, between the Spartans and the Persians. 

It made sense that my fellow Marines would love the movie. It featured a bunch of buff guys defending their homeland against a foreign invader, with the odds stacked heavily against them. There was no retreat, and they fought to the end.

But then something crazy happened. A few of my Marine buddies started likening the movie and the Spartans to our upcoming deployment to Iraq.

Even though we were the foreigners and had taken over the country with overwhelming military force, they saw things the other way around. It baffled me, until another Marine told me that it was their way of justifying why we were going there. The notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction had long been debunked by then. No one felt good about dying for Halliburton. So they latched on to a story to help justify their potentially impending doom.

As we attacked Iran and continued our “forever wars” in the Middle East, something troubling emerged from the ranks of the men and women who are on the front lines, along with our military leaders and some politicians. There is messaging that this war with Iran is somehow a religious war tied to the Book of Revelations, the second coming of Jesus, and the end of the world.

One of the stories was of a military commander who told his non-commissioned officers that........

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