When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, many of us immediately recognized that the American public was being fed a carefully constructed set of lies. The claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was repeated endlessly by politicians and media outlets, yet the underlying evidence was thin to the point of absurdity. A handful of skeptics pointed this out at the time and were loudly denounced for their trouble. History eventually vindicated them. Iraq possessed no such weapons, and the war—one of the greatest strategic disasters in modern American history—had been justified on false pretenses.

The same pattern is now unfolding again, though with one important difference. George W. Bush at least made the effort to manufacture public consent. His administration spent months saturating the public sphere with claims about aluminum tubes, mobile biological laboratories, and mushroom clouds. The propaganda campaign was relentless because the architects of the Iraq War understood that democratic legitimacy, however hollow, still required the appearance of persuasion.

Donald Trump has taken a different approach. Instead of persuading the public, he simply ignored it. Rather than slowly constructing a narrative of necessity, the Trump administration launched its attack on Iran first and began searching for explanations afterward. The war is now a reality, and like all wars it requires justification. The problem for the administration is that none of the available justifications are remotely credible.

So, as is customary in Washington, they are simply lying. The lies are not particularly convincing. Polling suggests that only about a quarter of Americans support the Israeli-American attack on Iran, a remarkably low figure for the opening stage of a military conflict. But persuasion was never really the point. Trump’s rhetoric follows a familiar pattern: contradictory statements, shifting rationales, a flood of claims that overwhelm the audience rather than persuade it.

This tactic has become a hallmark of modern propaganda. If enough conflicting explanations are released into the public sphere, the resulting confusion dulls scrutiny. People stop asking whether any particular claim is true and instead resign themselves to the idea that the situation is simply too complicated to understand.

But confusion should not prevent us from examining the central falsehoods that have been deployed to justify this war.

The first and most important is the nuclear weapons lie. For decades the specter of an Iranian nuclear bomb has been invoked as the ultimate justification for confrontation. Yet the remarkable fact—almost never mentioned in mainstream discourse—is that American intelligence agencies have consistently concluded that Iran has not pursued a nuclear weapon since 2003. That assessment emerged from the famous National Intelligence Estimate of that year and has never been overturned. Indeed, Trump’s own intelligence services reaffirmed the same conclusion only last year.

This reality renders much of the current rhetoric absurd. We are told that Iran’s nuclear capabilities pose an existential threat requiring immediate military action. Yet at the same time Trump boasts that his earlier strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Both statements cannot be true. If the program was destroyed, it cannot simultaneously justify an urgent war eight months later. The truth is that the Iranian nuclear issue has always been something of a geopolitical chimera.

Iran, lacking meaningful leverage against the United States, occasionally attempted to use nuclear enrichment as a bargaining chip. Increasing enrichment levels or restricting inspections created diplomatic pressure that Tehran hoped might produce sanctions relief or concessions. It was a risky strategy, but an understandable one for a country facing severe economic pressure and military encirclement. Unfortunately, those tactics also made it easier for Washington to portray Iran’s nuclear program as evidence of weaponization.

In reality, whenever a serious diplomatic agreement emerged, Iran proved willing to accept extremely intrusive monitoring. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action required inspection regimes far more rigorous than those imposed on any other nation. Iran complied with those terms despite the fact that the United States was already undermining the economic benefits the agreement was supposed to provide.

All of this occurred while Israel—ironically the most vocal critic of Iran’s nuclear ambitions—maintained its own undeclared arsenal of nuclear warheads, entirely outside international inspection.

Recent diplomatic efforts suggested that Iran was again willing to compromise. Tehran reportedly agreed not only to renewed inspections but also to avoid stockpiling enriched uranium, producing only what was necessary for civilian purposes. Any excess material would be transferred under international supervision.

The significance of this offer was underscored by an unusual statement from the Omani foreign minister, who publicly revealed the proposal just one day before the Israeli and American attacks began. Oman has historically conducted such diplomacy in near-total secrecy, so the decision to disclose the offer suggests a last-minute attempt to prevent the war. It failed. Neither Israel nor the Trump administration seemed particularly concerned about being caught launching a war in the face of an active diplomatic alternative.

The second major falsehood involves the claim of an imminent threat. Here the administration’s reasoning becomes almost comically circular. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that the United States needed to strike Iran because Israel was planning to attack Iran, which might provoke Iranian retaliation against American forces. In other words, the “imminent threat” consisted of a response to a war that our own ally intended to start.

This logic collapses immediately upon inspection. A threat cannot be considered imminent if it depends entirely on a chain of events that Washington itself has the power to prevent. Indeed, we saw precisely that scenario last year when Trump publicly ordered Israeli aircraft to stand down during an earlier confrontation.

Even more revealing, the Pentagon has acknowledged that it possessed no intelligence indicating Iran was planning to attack American forces. The supposed imminent threat simply did not exist.

Another widely repeated claim concerns Iran’s construction of underground facilities for its missile and nuclear programs. Netanyahu has cited these bunkers as evidence that Iran was approaching a “line of immunity,” implying that immediate military action was required before these facilities became too difficult to destroy.

But this argument is profoundly misleading. Iran was strengthening underground infrastructure for the simple reason that it had already been attacked by two nuclear-armed powers. Protecting critical military and civilian facilities from airstrikes is not evidence of aggression; it is basic strategic prudence. Virtually every country facing such threats would do the same.

Moreover, if the nuclear issue were truly the concern, diplomacy offered a straightforward solution. Any agreement restoring international inspections would have granted the International Atomic Energy Agency full access to those facilities.

The final deception involves the fantasy of regime change. American planners appear to have entertained the notion that figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the Shah, might emerge as leaders of a post-Islamic Republic Iran. Such speculation betrays a profound ignorance of Iranian political realities.

Pahlavi’s father ruled Iran as an authoritarian monarch installed through a CIA-backed coup in 1953. The regime collapsed in 1979 after years of repression and political unrest. Since then Pahlavi has lived in exile, occasionally presenting himself as a democratic reformer despite his dynastic claims. Within Iran itself, however, his support appears minimal. Occasional chants during protests have been seized upon by Western commentators, but there is no evidence of a coherent movement capable of installing him in power.

This leaves the United States with the same problem it faced repeatedly over the past quarter century: it can destroy governments far more easily than it can replace them. The wars in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan all followed this pattern. Each intervention was justified by grand promises of democratic transformation. Each ultimately produced instability and strategic failure. The war against Iran appears destined to follow the same trajectory.

Ultimately the central characteristic of this conflict is deception—both directed outward at the public and inward toward the policymakers themselves. Trump and his advisers seem to have convinced themselves that military force can easily topple a government that has survived decades of sanctions and regional confrontation. Perhaps even more remarkable is that they have embraced this gamble after watching the repeated failures of their predecessors.

From Ronald Reagan onward, every American president faced pressure to confront Iran militarily. None of them, despite their flaws, proved reckless enough to take the plunge. Donald Trump has now done so.

This is unmistakably an American war, even if it advances strategic goals long advocated by Israel’s leadership. Trump was not dragged into the conflict against his will. He chose it, encouraged by advisers who believe they are on the verge of another geopolitical triumph.

But the justifications offered to the public—nuclear threats, imminent attacks, humanitarian concerns—are largely pretexts. The real motivation is simpler and far older: the desire to eliminate the one regional power that has consistently resisted American and Israeli dominance in the Middle East.

The result is a war of choice built on a familiar foundation of deception.

We have seen this before. Twenty-three years ago the same political system marched confidently into Iraq on the basis of equally dubious claims. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars later, the consequences of that decision remain painfully visible.

Many Americans learned a lesson from that catastrophe. Unfortunately, the small group of people still making these decisions clearly did not.