When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, many of us knew, and argued loudly, that the American public was being lied to. We knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and could back up our claims. The war went ahead anyway, but eventually, the lies were exposed. 

 

Debunking the Lies of the Iran War

Mitchell Plitnick for Mondoweiss

 

Rather than build up support for his illegal and immoral war on Iran, as George W. Bush did nearly a quarter century ago, Donald Trump elected to simply ignore public opinion and start the war on his own. But, while Trump has his war and is not likely to be stopped by domestic forces until the war runs its course, he has found a need to justify his criminal actions.

As is their way, Trump and his minions simply lie. They’re not convincing many people, as polling shows that only about one in four Americans supports the Israeli-American attack on Iran. 

This time, the lies are coming in true Trumpian fashion: they are inconsistent, contradictory, and confusing, meant more to overwhelm the audience than to convince it. But we shouldn’t be complacent about these lies. They have a way of both framing the debate and taking on a life of their own over time. 

It’s important to examine some of these lies, and we should start with the biggest one.

The “Iran nuclear weapons program” lie

Over and over, we hear about the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon. But rare indeed are the arguments for why this should be considered a casus belli when all reliable intelligence assessments have agreed that Iran has not pursued a nuclear weapon since 2003. 

That assessment never wavered and never changed. It remains in place today. In the United States, it was reinforced by Donald Trump’s own intelligence services, collectively, just last year. 

Moreover, while Trump’s endless boasting about having “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program was always a lie, it is undeniable that significant damage was done to Iran’s key nuclear facilities last year. Yet we are somehow meant to believe that Iran’s nuclear potential is a threat, a mere eight months later.

The issue of a nuclear weapon has been a chimera from the start. Unfortunately, it was also manipulated by Iran at times. Having little real leverage against the United States, either militarily or diplomatically, Iran would sometimes turn to nuclear enrichment to try to get leverage in its efforts to either confront the West or press for sanctions relief.

That was a dubious strategy, even if it was understandable under the circumstances, as it gives the United States all it needs to falsely characterize Iran’s nuclear program as an effort to acquire a nuclear weapon. Iran would also, from time to time, diminish or even suspend cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This, too, was an understandable strategy under the circumstances, but it had the same effect of creating evidence for arguments about the covert and dangerous nature of Iran’s nuclear program.

These tactics have been part of Iran’s game plan for 20 years. It’s not often discussed in those terms in the West, but it’s well understood in most governments and, coupled with the consistent intelligence assessments, makes it clear that Iran has not been in pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Whether Donald Trump can grasp this is, of course, an open question. 

Yet when presented with a deal they perceive as in their interests, Iran has shown remarkable flexibility. The 2015 JCPOA, often called the Iran Nuclear Deal, provided for far more intrusive inspections than any country has ever been forced to undergo. Iran agreed and upheld its part of the bargain, despite the fact that the United States—which had agreed not only to lift certain nuclear-related sanctions but also to encourage investment in Iran to help its economy recover—had been actively discouraging economic support for Iran’s recovery. And despite the fact that its main regional adversary, Israel, had its own secret, undeclared, and unmonitored nuclear weapons stockpile of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of warheads. 

This time, Iran agreed not only to IAEA inspections that were at least as intrusive, it also agreed not to stockpile enriched uranium. That means they would enrich only what they needed for their civilian use, and any excess would be handed over to whomever the IAEA agreed to send it to. 

That’s what the Omani foreign minister announced to the world the day before Israel and the United States launched their attack on Iran. Given how closed-mouth Oman is in general and how close to the chest they have always kept information during all the negotiations they have mediated, this declaration was unprecedented. That he made that statement indicates he knew the attack was coming and hoped to thwart it. Sadly, he failed because neither Israel nor the Trump administration cares about being embarrassed by being caught in an outright lie. 

The nuclear lie is the root of all of this, but many other lies are a part of the picture. 

The “imminent threat” lie

The Trump administration has argued that there was an imminent threat to U.S. troops in the region. When Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio was asked to detail the threat, he said that, “It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, … they were going to respond and respond against the United States. If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.”

So, Rubio is arguing that we had to attack Iran because otherwise Israel, beyond our control, was going to attack Iran and precipitate an attack on U.S. troops in the region. That, he argued, was the “imminent threat.”

The circular reasoning here is fallacious to the point that one would think it was spoken by a kindergartener. 

There can’t be an imminent threat spurred by something you yourself have control of. 

Moreover, just last June, we saw Trump literally force Israeli warplanes to reverse course mid-flight. He is more than capable of stopping an Israeli attack before one happens. Netanyahu would not dare spit in Trump’s face in that manner. 

The U.S. was well aware that Iran had no plans to attack it. On Sunday, the Pentagon revealed, in a congressional briefing, that there was no intelligence in American possession whatsoever that indicated Iran was planning an attack. There simply was no imminent threat.

The “underground missiles” lie

“They’re totally fanatic about this, about the goal of destroying America. So they started building new sites, new places, underground bunkers that would make their ballistic missile programs and their atomic bomb programs immune within months if no action was taken.”

That was Netanyahu spelling out his cover story for this war of choice. This is a different kind of lie: it’s not exactly false, but it is decontextualized and deeply misleading. 

Iran was reinforcing its underground facilities. This is only sensible. They had been attacked in June by two nuclear powers, both of which are militarily much stronger, especially in terms of air power, than Iran. 

Iran was obviously aware that their nuclear facilities and ballistic missile stock and program were the main targets. Building underground facilities for the nuclear program and missiles is simply good sense, and absolutely Iran’s right. Further, all the United States had to do regarding the nuclear program was strike an agreement with Iran, and the IAEA would have had full access to the underground nuclear facilities.

Again, the idea that this justifies an unprovoked attack is absurd and well outside what is permissible under international law.

The Pahlavi lie

I’m using Reza Pahlavi, the son of the long-deposed Shah of Iran, as a marker for the general lack of any vision of what happens as a result of this criminal attack.

For Israel, this question is less pressing. While an Iran that looks like Syria or Libya would mean considerably less security for Israeli citizens, that is not a bad thing from Netanyahu’s point of view. His brand of demagoguery literally feeds off the fear of the citizens he rules, and threats only enhance his ability to eliminate the democracy that exists for Jews in Israel. 

For the U.S., it’s a more pressing matter, yet one they apparently haven’t thought through. 

They seem initially to have believed that Pahlavi could be brought in to lead Iran in place of the Islamic Republic, although Trump has expressed his lack of confidence in Pahlavi. He offered flowery words about being a stopgap leader who was simply going to usher in a new, pro-Western, pro-Israel, Iranian democracy.

But let’s recall who Pahlavi is. His father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a brutal dictator, reinstalled by the United States in 1953 after the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was ousted in a CIA-backed coup.

Pahlavi himself lived in exile from the time his father was ousted, and after his father’s death, he named himself the new king of Iran. In 1982, Pahlavi was part of a plot, backed by the U.S. and Israel, to launch a coup in Iran, but it was abandoned when the Israeli leadership changed and the new prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, thought the venture unwise. There are other instances like this in his history.

Pahlavi denies being connected to Israel or to American intelligence, but that is hardly credible. He is the son of a monarch, and his calls for democracy, given his history, ring hollow. More to the point, while there are some who have called his name during protests, Pahlavi, like other exiled Iranian figures and groups, has no coordinated support within Iran.

The Trump administration is currently encouraging Kurdish and other ethnic militias to help overthrow the Islamic Republic government, but the efforts have thus far been met with skepticism. That’s not surprising given the American history of abandoning such people after they rise up, reinforced only recently during the protests in Iran. 

The truth is, the United States has no idea what will happen if the Iranian government does fall. They are killing one leader after another, thinking they will eventually find someone who will work with the U.S. as Delcy Rodriguez has in Venezuela. I’m aware of no one who actually studies Iran who thinks that is going to happen. It’s even less likely now that he’s killed most of the people he thought might fit that bill. 

Deception is the main characteristic of American planning here, and one aspect of that is self-deception. Trump has allowed Netanyahu to convince him to engage in this foolish and reckless endeavor. It says much that none of Trump’s predecessors, going all the way back to the days of Ronald Reagan, were this stupid.

Make no mistake, this is an American war, even as it fulfills Netanyahu’s dearest and oldest dream. Trump was not forced or even tricked into this. He, and others on his staff (chiefly Marco Rubio) are flush with their apparent success in Venezuela, and Trump has visions of going down in history as the man who eliminated the hated Islamic Republic, a target of widespread, bipartisan American scorn since 1979.

There was never any possibility of a diplomatic resolution, as evidenced by what Iran offered just before Israel struck the first blow. For both Israel and the Trump administration, this war is rooted in the deep desire to eliminate the one country that has defied American and Israeli hegemony for years. The threat of a nuclear weapon is a lie, the concern about Iran’s quite abysmal human rights record is a complete sham. 

It’s a war of choice, built on lies. We’ve been here before, two decades ago. Most Americans learned a lesson from that, which is why so few support this calamity. Unfortunately, the ones making the decisions are among the few who learned nothing. 

Mitchell Plitnick is president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. His previous positions include vice president at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, director of the US Office of B’Tselem, and co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace. His writing has appeared in Ha’aretz, the New Republic, the Jordan Times, Middle East Report, the San Francisco Chronicle, +972 Magazine, Outlook, and other outlets. He was a columnist for Tikkun Magazine, Zeek Magazine and Souciant. He has spoken all over the country on Middle East politics, and has regularly offered commentary in a wide range of radio and television outlets including PBS News Hour, the O’Reilly Factor, i24 (Israel), Pacifica Radio, CNBC Asia and many other outlets, as well as at his own blog at http://www.rethinkingforeignpolicy.org.

 

https://scheerpost.com/2026/03/04/debunking-the-lies-of-the-iran-war/

 

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