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Fool Me Twice: The Case for War With Iran Is Even Thinner Than It Was for Iraq

The case for invading Iraq was based on lies. The Trump administration’s case for war with Iran hardly exists at all.

Days before embarking America on another foreign war, Donald Trump spent more than 90 minutes speaking endlessly about America being back during his State of the Union, leveling racist accusations of Somali American fraud, and expounding on the beauty of America’s raid to arrest Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. It was a master class in testing the attention span of Americans hoping to hear anything at all about the danger that has loomed in the background now for months: the threat of armed conflict with Iran. Those who made it to the finale — and who have conscious memories of the George W. Bush years — would have noticed a similar tenor to the State of the Union in 2003, the one which paved the way for the justification of the invasion of Iraq less than two months later.

In that speech, Bush outlined the alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the myriad ways in which Iraq had supposedly deceived international investigators, and the staggering human rights abuses committed by Saddam Hussein against his own countrymen. Secretary of State Colin Powell, the president boasted, would soon outline to the United Nations the threat the United States, and indeed the world, was up against in Baghdad.

Bush’s Iraq War Lies Created a Blueprint for Donald Trump

However, while many of the claims made by Bush were spurious at best and outright deceptions at worst, the claims Trump made in his speech were even less believable — and much more scattershot. Trump claimed that Iran would “soon” have intercontinental ballistic missiles that would “reach the United States of America,” that more than 32,000 Iranians had been killed in recent protests (NGOs estimated the number to be much lower, and an Iranian human rights group put the death toll at 6,488), and that the Iranian military had somehow killed “millions,” somewhere in history, with roadside bombs it pioneered. Perhaps most plainly false of all, Trump contended he just wanted the Iranians to say “those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon,’” despite Iranian officials constantly making such insistences.

Before the U.S. and Israeli military launched strikes Saturday, the specter of an Iranian war has become something of a national miasma, the build-up having gone on now so long that its cause is imperceptible, yet perhaps everything at once. The build-up to the Iraq War was similarly argued under many causes, with Saddam’s authoritarian governance very much part of the discussion, but the aftermath of 9/11 and the supposed threat Iraq posed to the homeland was chief among them — the fire that led Americans to line up front and center behind the cause. While Iran has been on the wish list for American neoconservatives and foreign policy wonks for decades, this escalation has happened over a much shorter time frame, much more suddenly, and much more obvious in how the government is desperately in search of a compelling cause.

Stretching back into December, the cards were being laid out. Benjamin Netanyahu had made plans to meet with Trump at the White House to discuss what he saw as the threat posed by Iran’s conventional ballistic missile program, seeking a green light to initiate another devastating war, with hoped-for American support. Israel’s reasoning was not based on Iranian human rights abuses or about threats to the American homeland, but threats to Israel and “U.S. interests,” according to NBC News. Netanyahu had wanted a post-war situation similar to Lebanon’s, where Israel has been able to continue striking that country daily with Hezbollah unable to respond. Iran still retained deterrent military capacity to prevent this from happening. A greater threat, however nonexistent, needed to be communicated.

The rollout of news stories to back up Netanyahu’s claim was well-telegraphed, with reports suddenly emerging in the Israeli press that Iran was planning to use an imminent military exercise as a diversion to strike Israel. At the same time that........

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