Trump and Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Oct. 13, 2025. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have launched their most dangerous war yet, but the pretenses underpinning it are weaker than ever. You’re already being bombarded by lies from the White House, the Capitol, and TV commentators.
Here are seven truths behind the half-hearted arguments meant to manufacture consent for a war you never asked for:
1. This War Won’t Keep Americans Safe
Trump says he launched this war to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” He apparently expects us to forget he used this lie the last time he bombed Iran. What was true in June still is true now: There’s no evidence the Iranian government is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon (despite Netanyahu’s claims to the contrary for the past 30 years), the Iranian military do not have weapons that can strike the US (despite Trump’s claim to the contrary) – a fact confirmed by my old employer, the Defense Intelligence Agency – and Iran’s leaders had no intention of preemptively attacking US forces in the Middle East.
The Trump administration’s pained justification that Iran planned to fire missiles “preemptively, but if not, if not simultaneous, against with any actions against them,” is beyond dubious given that the Iranian government watched US forces posturing to attack for weeks and did not, in fact, launch a preemptive strike against them (and “simultaneous” is an exceptionally creative way to say “firing missiles after we start attacking them”).
If Iran really represented an immediate threat to the American people, why has Trump been telegraphing this attack since mid-January? What is true is that the Iranian government’s missiles, drones, and proxies can strike US forces in the region, which is exactly what started happening on Saturday after US planes started bombing Iran. Anyone who actually wanted to keep US forces safe could simply move them out of the region and out of range of Tehran’s capabilities – or, even easier – just avoid starting a war of choice with them in the first place.
2. Iran Isn’t Really the Greatest Threat to Stability in the Middle East Today
Since the 1990s, Gulf States have increasingly tied their security to the United States and (less publicly) Israel, expecting protection against Iran. Today, as Iranian missiles strike Riyadh, Dubai, Manama, Kuwait City, and Doha, they’ve discovered they are, in fact, cannon fodder in a war that Trump and Netanyahu dragged them into.
Iran hawks point to the Iranian government’s myriad and all-too-real crimes – from murderously suppressing protests to backing the brutal dictator Bashar al-Asad in Syria as he slaughtered his own people – to support the fantasy that regime change in Iran would be a cure-all for the region’s woes. It’s a fantasy because it ignores the principal sources of instability in the region: Endless US and Israeli military aggression. The calamitous 2003 US invasion of Iraq – the aftershocks of which are still ongoing – and the inhumane Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, most recently culminating in the Gaza genocide, had nothing to do with Iran. Israeli ministers and US officials alike don’t even bother to cite an Iranian threat when advocating for a “Greater Israel” that would swallow up large chunks of its neighbors’ territory (Israel already occupies small parts of Syria and Lebanon, and Israeli officials are also increasingly marking Turkey as their next target).
Anyone serious about improving life for people in the region – scores of whom have already been killed in this war – must reckon with the pernicious role the US and Israeli governments play, not just Iran’s.
3. Trump Has No Idea How and When This War Ends
The Trump administration expects us to forget decades of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, with Vice President JD Vance astonishingly asserting, “we have to avoid overlearning the lessons of the past.” The lesson, which he seems at no risk of “overlearning” even after serving in Iraq himself, is that a hastily-conceived military adventure in a large Middle Eastern country, with poorly defined goals and no tangible connection to the safety and prosperity of the American people, will end badly for all involved. While the administration maintains it has “planned an escalating series of strikes with off-ramps along the way,” it has no say in whether Iran’s leadership, now in an existential fight for survival (Iranian state media has confirmed that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in the Israeli-US strikes), will accept those off-ramps.
Smoke rises over Tehran after US and Israeli strikes. Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images 4. Negotiations Didn’t ‘Break Down.’ They Were Never Meant to Succeed in the First Place
Just like with Trump’s June 2025 attack on Iran, recent US-Iran negotiations proved little more than a smokescreen for an administration preparing for war. Senate Majority Leader John Thune claimed on Saturday that Iran “refused diplomatic off-ramps,” but mere hours before the attack, a key mediator in the US-Iran nuclear talks told CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ he was confident “a peace deal is within our reach.”
Trump’s diplomacy was never in good faith, which he made clear with his varied, often ill-defined, and at times deliberately unacceptable demands to Iranian officials. Last month, Trump threatened strikes if the Iranian government didn’t stop killing protesters. By last week, he’d forgotten the protesters and had focused negotiations on curtailing Iran’s nuclear program. And Friday night, after the Iranian government had agreed to “unparalleled” concessions, including getting rid of its enriched uranium, Trump started bombing and announced a host of additional goals, including destroying Iran’s conventional military, its ballistic missiles, its regional proxies, and its political leadership. The aims of this war bear little resemblance to the so-called negotiations that captured recent headlines, but they do sound a lot like the maximalist demands of hawks like Netanyahu and his ideological allies in DC.
5. This War Has Nothing to Do With Promoting Democracy
Anyone who thinks Trump cares about spreading democracy must have been sleeping in class during Trump’s last supposedly “pro-democracy” regime change operation. Less than two months ago, Trump abducted authoritarian Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, only to leave the rest of his government intact as long as they agreed to let Trump confiscate Venezuela’s oil wealth. You’d also have to have been absent for years of Trump’s escalating attempts to dismantle democracy in the United States itself, from his insurrection-inspiring “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen to his deadly militarization of US cities with lawless ICE thugs to his plans today to restrict voting access and assert executive branch control over voting. As Trump threatens civil society, arrests activists, and his own masked goons beat, tear gas, and murder people in the street, you shouldn’t believe he wants to fight for democracy in Iran or anywhere else.
6. The Admin Has No Plan Beyond Trying to Create a New Failed State in the Middle East
Attempting the likely-impossible objective of installing a new, America-and-Israel-friendly government in Tehran, democratic or otherwise, would require a momentous, bloody ground campaign that would dwarf the scale and cost of the occupation of Iraq. But, for better or worse, neither Trump nor Netanyahu’s thinking seems to go beyond “bomb first, ask questions later.” Achieving regime collapse – turning Iran into a neutered, failed state like Libya following the 2011 US-led regime change – seems more likely than regime change. That outcome would avoid the costs of a war of occupation but have horrific consequences for the over 90 million people in Iran, with unpredictable spillover effects for the region as a whole. But, for Trump and the Iran hawks gleefully cheering him on, clean-up is someone else’s problem.
Smoke rises after Iran carried out a missile strike on the main headquarters of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet in Manama, Bahrain, on Feb. 28, 2026. Photo by Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images 7. This War Doesn’t Just Belong to Donald Trump and Republicans
Despite Trump’s “Peace President” platform – one that was wildly popular with his base – he’s leading the country into a new war, ably backed by congressional Republicans who are all too happy to surrender their constitutional war-making authority. Unfortunately, the pro-Iran war camp has a big tent with plenty of room for Democrats, a few of whom even joined Republicans in trying to cede their authority to Trump. Party leadership could most charitably be described as disinterested in stopping Trump from waging war on Iran, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer only publicly endorsing war powers resolutions a day and a half before strikes began, following outcry from the party’s base and its farther-seeing members. Even after the bombing began today, they offered only tepid statements objecting to Trump’s procedural violations but were unable to object to the war itself. Then there was Joe Biden’s former secretary of state, Antony Blinken, still highly-regarded in mainstream Democratic politics, cheering on Trump’s first Iran strikes last year, or then-candidate Kamala Harris calling Iran America’s “greatest adversary” a month before her election.
The Iran war they have all hoped for, or at least tacitly encouraged, is not just a human tragedy but a tragedy of American democracy. Only 21% of US adults – and 6% of Democrats – supported a war on Iran, per a University of Maryland poll earlier this month. Meanwhile, a whopping 74% of Democrats oppose war with Iran (and a large 49% plurality of Americans overall). They deserve leaders who represent them.
Harrison Mann is a former US Army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East/Africa Regional Center who resigned in protest of his office’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza under the Biden administration. He is currently with the group Win Without War.