By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
March 7, 2026
Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I've been telling them "Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier."
There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction - they just didn't buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people.
This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration's attack on Iran. Mostly it's just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed.
This time they're not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They're not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They're just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it.
I've spent years, decades, obsessing over the Bush Administration's Iraq WMD lies, writing about them, debunking them.I can think of no lie about Iraq WMDs told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al that comes even close to the enormity and absurdity of this lie from Donald Trump. t.co
- Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 5, 2026
The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we're seeing now, it's almost quaint.
This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.
They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They're selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they're just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying "Yeah we're thugs. What are you gonna do about it?"
This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.
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