This is not a partisan affair. Experts in military strategy, regional history, and current power dynamics in the Middle East—as well as American politics and geoeconomics—are struggling to make sense of the U.S.–Israel war launched on February 28 and warn that its escalatory spiral is spinning out of control.
But just like when the bloom was off the rose in late 2003, when the insurgencies and sectarian violence started emerging in Iraq and it was becoming clear that the Bush administration had no plan for “what’s next,” the cheerleaders and shills are rushing to battle stations today to do everything to maintain some sort of rationalization for the disaster unfolding right before our eyes.
This time, these messaging force-multipliers, tied directly or otherwise to the political and military machinery behind this war, shouldn’t get off so easily. Too many of them were around for the last big war when they lied and cajoled the American public into thinking we simply needed more “stomach” for the fight in Iraq. Many were called out. But apparently not enough.
Mixed in with the familiar figures are new voices lobbying for a big Mideast war. We have influencers paid in dark money from our “partners” in the Israeli government. They are mixed in with ideological diehards pervasive in conservative normie media and the fever swamps of X, Fox News, and talk radio. Then there are the national security “experts” who for professional reasons—establishment status or, more insidiously, ties to the defense industry or the think tanks funded by it—are rolled out onto major media to legitimize a cockeyed strategy pulling the country further into endless war.
Take note, because remembering what they say today will be important for the reckoning tomorrow.
Ideological Diehards
The loudest voices in this arena are also the most bloodthirsty and vicious when it comes to dissent. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Fox News host Mark Levin, podcaster Ben Shapiro, and social media influencer Laura Loomer are like the Red Guards trying to enforce order on the right, and they are becoming more shrill by the day as they see MAGA cohesion breaking down because of President Trump’s war.
“Just so you are aware, if you suspect someone you know in the US is working on behalf of Iran or any other adversary during a time of war, you can and should report them to the FBI and DOJ. It’s the America First thing to do,” said Loomer in a recent X post. “We need to bring back McCarthyism and start rooting out traitors.”
On March 15, Levin read out most of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1940 Fireside Chat, “Arsenal of Democracy”, which was an effort to conflate anti-war voices in America at the time with spies, enemy agents, and sympathizers. In FDR’s words, “these trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people, to divide them into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves.”
Levin said Trump “is doing what all great presidents do: taking on a government, an illegitimate terrorist regime, whose roots are in seventh-century barbarism… just like Franklin D. Roosevelt had to take out a barbaric Third Reich.”
He said opponents of this war, like those of 1940, “are giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” Levin saves his real venom for dissidents on the right. “Shame on you… You will be remembered as anti-America, neo-fascist Jew haters.”
The political scientist Max Abrahms has long promoted war with Iran and often smears conservatives as antisemitic isolationists. Abrahms, who teaches counterterrorism at Northeastern University, last week joined Loomer in rage-posting against Tucker and Joe Kent, who resigned from his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the war with Iran.
“My sense is Tucker served as a backchannel between Joe Kent and Iran. Joe leaked national security secrets to Tucker who was communicating with the Iranian regime,” Abrahms posted on X last week.
Abrahms chortled in July that “MAGA isolationists” were embarrassed because they had warned that the U.S.–Israel attacks on Iran in June would lead to a regional conflagration. Yet here we are. But he and others still cling to the notion that Trump is playing 4D chess and that America’s apparent strategic blunder is part of an elaborate plan that only really smart military experts can understand.
Other pro-war voices share that view. “You actually have to throw your enemies off their game,” Ben Shapiro told Fox News last week, calling Trump’s war “the single bravest foreign policy move of my lifetime” and arguing that the Iranian regime is now in its “death throes.”
Many think tankers seem to think the Iran war is going swimmingly for the U.S. “We are destroying Iran’s ability to even produce more weapons after we’ve destroyed the missiles, the launchers, the drones, and so the Iranians at this point only have the ability to essentially terrorize, shooting a drone here, a drone there, at civilian targets against Gulf states,” said the Hudson Institute’s Rebeccah Heinrichs, a regular now on Fox News, last week.
It was the same week in which “a drone here, a drone there,” plus Iran’s ballistic missiles, struck numerous oil and gas sites across the Gulf, emptied U.S. embassies, terrorized Israeli citizens, drove up gas prices, and raised the risks of a global recession. The neoconservative Hudson Institute has received $2.6 million from defense contractors in funding since 2019, according to the Think Tank Tracker.
The best sign that things are going sideways is when the cheerleaders just stop making sense, like when they say Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement of lifting sanctions on some Iranian oil only hurts the Chinese, or that Iran’s launching Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, is an ex-post facto “imminent threat” to the United States. “Basically every major development in the Iran War has vindicated Trump’s decision to strike,” says Will Chamberlain. Nice try.
Abrahms unironically says “the discrepancy between the war commentary and what’s actually happening in the war is the greatest the world has ever seen.” He doesn’t realize how right he is.
Then there is the stray neoconservative Never Trumper who, despite their previous revulsion at anything the current president says or does, has given their blessing to his war aims today.
Eliot Cohen, who not only led the cheer sections for Iraq and Afghanistan two decades ago but has been shaming Americans into supporting the Ukraine war, now says the media is being too “negative” with regards to Operation Epic Fury.
“The [Iranians’] desire to destroy [Israel]… the failure to talk about that is driving me crazy. The truth is on [Trump’s] side,” Cohen said, noting that previous presidents just didn’t act against Iran decisively but that Trump “is actually trying to resolve it in a very direct violent way.”
Retired four stars giving one-star analysis
When you see a retired four-star on the media, it’s best to follow the money and/or the professional affiliation to understand where their analysis is coming from. The producers and editors won’t do it for you: That way, Admiral High Hat can say whatever he wants and be afforded all sorts of authority without the viewers knowing what his conflicts of interest are.
Take General Jack Keane. He has been shilling for war on Fox since Iraq. He’s been out of service since 2003 and in that time has worked in private equity investing in military tech and has ties with several defense contractors, including serving on the board of General Dynamics.
Keane is probably the most prolific war supporter on Fox and stands to benefit financially the longer the war goes on. Each of his appearances show his aptitude for saying things that defy reality. He told Fox News viewers that “we aren’t going to go toe-to-toe” with Iran on the Strait of Hormuz (which days later the Pentagon said we were doing) and that we would instead escort shipping with Navy ships (which we are not doing).
The Jewish Institute for National Security of America has scores of former American military officers in its stable, including Ret. Vice Adm. Robert Harward, a former Centcom deputy commander, who just a week ago was lauding Israeli assassinations and regime change operations.
Calling Tehran “the center of gravity,” he told CNN that “if the IRGC can be decimated so the people have that advantage, maybe arm the people. That’s how this thing flips.” Harward retired in 2013 went to work for Lockheed Martin, heading up its UAE business for eight years. He is now a top executive for Shield AI, which currently holds major contracts with the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard.
In a later interview with NPR, he said the length of the war would be “irrelevant” if the end result was destroying the regime. “Only allow a regime that we support, and the people support, to come to power. Anyone else remains a target. So I think that’s a very sound strategy.”
So does Ret. General H.R. McMaster, who works for the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which we now know the White House cribbed from to make its case against Iran. He actually laughed when asked by CBS News last week about regional escalation.
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Ret. Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who also works for FDD (which does not disclose its donors), warns that “China is watching” and that we just need patience to see the genius of Trump’s vision.
“If the United States can hold firm for the next few weeks, it can fully degrade Iran’s war-making apparatus,” he wrote for the New York Times on March 19. “This would usher in a multiyear interval of calm of the kind that neither sanctions nor diplomacy has been able to produce in over four decades. In that window, a better regional order could emerge.”
These manufacturers of consent are no different from their Iraq war counterparts. Calling them out will mean absolutely nothing, however, if they are not held accountable by the court of public opinion and whatever foreign policy establishment survives the wreckage of this catastrophic war.
