The expression, I believe, is “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” (As George W. Bush discovered, it’s easy to mangle.) In 2003, a lot of people were fooled by propaganda into thinking that Iraq posed a major threat to the United States, a threat that could only be neutralized through a major war. When the war became a catastrophe, it became evident that—at the very least—we should have more carefully evaluated the arguments that were made in favor of going to war. They turned out to be completely wrong, and many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as nearly 4,500 Americans, died as a result. 

In the New York Times opinion page this past week, there have been multiple arguments made in favor of Israel launching a major attack on Iran. First Bret Stephens wrote a piece called “We Absolutely Need To Escalate In Iran.” Then, Israeli politician Benny Gantz (widely considered the potential “moderate” alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu) wrote “What the World Needs to Understand About Iran.” Both are classic pieces of pro-war propaganda that selectively leave out every fact that could lead readers to conclude there are options for dealing with Iran other than violence. They are worth analyzing, because by seeing how Stephens and Gantz manipulate the truth, we can teach ourselves to see through the spin that leads people to wrongly conclude that war is our only option. 

Stephens poses the hypothetical of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. Referring to the recent barrage of Iranian missiles, Stephens asks: “What if one of those missiles had been tipped with a nuclear warhead—a warhead whose construction Western intelligence agencies, even Mossad, had somehow missed?” He says the possibility is “no longer far-off,” and that “a prime goal” for Iran (acquisition of a nuclear weapon) is now “in sight.” It is the time, he says, “for someone to do something about it.” Israel, he says, has been delaying Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon through “sabotage, assassinations of leading scientists, cyberattacks, document heists and other covert acts.” Now it must, Stephen says, go further, and launch a major attack on Iran. This is because: 

Iran presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead. It is waging a war on unarmed commercial ships through its Houthi proxies in Yemen. It has used other proxies to attack and kill American troops stationed in allied countries. It encouraged or ordered Hezbollah to fire nearly 9,000 rockets into Israel, supposedly in solidarity with Hamas, before Israel finally began retaliating with full force last month. And it appears to be seeking Donald Trump’s assassination, according to reporting by The Times — a direct assault on American democracy, no matter how anyone feels about the former president. There needs to be a direct and unmistakable American response. Iran currently produces many of its missiles at the Isfahan missile complex. At a minimum, Biden should order it destroyed, as a direct and proportionate response to its aggressions. 

Stephens says Joe Biden should also threaten the “immediate destruction” of Iran’s “pipelines, refineries, and oil terminals” unless Iran “order[s] Hezbollah and the Houthis to stand down” and pressures Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages. Stephens acknowledges that critics will say his preferred approach “invites escalation,” but says that “Bully regimes respond to the stick,” citing the fact that “the Iranians began asking for the nuclear negotiations they spurned for the past three years only once they started to fear that Trump might return to office.” Coercion, he argues, is the best medicine. 

Before we analyze what Stephens says, it’s worth noting what doesn’t appear in his article. First, there is absolutely zero consideration of what the likely Iranian response to these attacks would be, or of the critical question of how the war he wants to see can be kept from spiraling out of control. Stephens avoids the issue that was also avoided in the leadup to the Iraq war: how do you think this is going to end? (Stephens himself was a propagandist for that war, a role he has no regrets over.) Stephens also doesn’t mention international law, or try to make an argument that attacking Iran’s oil pipelines would be consistent with it. (There is a case to be made that it would not.) This an important omission, because while I’m sure Stephens would argue that an attack on Iran would be a fully legal act of self-defense, the fact is that international law is so routinely ignored by the U.S. and Israel that Stephens doesn’t even feel the need to prove that what he’s recommending would comply with it. 

So, no mention of the potential human toll of the war that Stephens seeks to escalate, and no mention of international law. And I’m all but certain that he isn’t proposing to go and fight in the war himself. But Stephens is also manipulating his readers in his account of the supposedly urgent threat that Iran poses. 

First, a few facts that you won’t read often in columns like this. The U.S. intelligence community has long assessed that Iran “isn’t currently working to build a nuclear device” and has no evidence that the country’s supreme leader is “considering resuming his country’s nuclear-weapons program, which U.S. intelligence says was largely suspended in 2003.” A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in August that “Iran doesn’t have an active military nuclear program.” After a CBS host at the recent Vice Presidential debate warned that Iran could build a nuclear weapon in “one or two weeks,” the New York Times clarified that this was false. Iran itself has said it would only consider trying to build a nuclear weapon if its existence was threatened. As leading Iran expert John Ghazvinian notes, Iran’s leaders have long “concluded that they have more to gain from ‘playing by the rules’ of the international nonproliferation order than they do from racing for the bomb,” and there are obstacles “ranging from religious reservations about the morality of nuclear weapons to Iran’s membership in the global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).” Ghazvinian says that this may be changing, but it’s in part changing because Iran is constantly being threatened with attack by Israel and the United States. Ghazvinian warns that “Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities would cause a rethinking of Iran’s nuclear posture,” meaning that the course of action Stephens recommends could be precisely what triggers Iran to go from not seeking a nuclear weapon to seeking one. 

Not discussed in Stephens’ column is the question of why Iran might want a nuclear weapon. Stephens poses a hypothetical in which Iran fires a nuclear missile at Israel by surprise, but a more obvious motivation (though, as I say, it remains doubtful that Iran is even trying to build a nuclear weapon) is that nuclear weapons keep a state from being attacked. Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has written that since “the world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all… had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.” Foreign policy analyst Thomas Powers observes that nuclear states “cannot be casually threatened,” so Iran’s leaders may believe possession of nuclear weapons could “save Iran from a similar fate” as Iraq.

The one crucial fact that goes entirely undiscussed whenever the Iranian nuclear question comes up is that Israel itself possesses nuclear weapons. Israel, unlike Iran, is not a party to the nonproliferation treaty, and arguably its clandestine possession of nuclear weapons should require the United States to cut off military aid to it under U.S. law. In fact, Iran has long held the position that no state in the Middle East, including itself, should possess nuclear weapons, and that a formal nuclear weapon free zone should be established for the whole Middle East. In fact, every country in the United Nations supports establishing such a zone, with the exception of the U.S. and Israel! This means that if Israel was willing to abide by the same standard that it holds Iran to, there would be no Iranian “nuclear threat” to begin with. The entire issue is that Israel claims the right to possess a weapon that it will not allow Iran to have, and Israel has proven willing to engage in—as Stephens notes—sabotage, cyberattacks, and assassination in Iran in order to enforce the double standard. Even so, Iran was actually willing to accept restrictions on its nuclear programs as part of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Iran was certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency to be complying with its obligations under that deal, but the Trump administration blew it up. Stephens is misrepresenting the facts by claiming that Iran “spurned nuclear negotiations.” In fact, Iran had indicated its desire to revive the deal, although Israel pressured the Biden administration not to reenter the deal. The Biden administration ultimately decided not to pursue the deal and spurned Iranian diplomatic overtures. Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is more moderate than his predecessor and has appeared to extend an olive branch—one that the U.S. and Israel seem inclined to snap in half. 

Let us turn to Gantz. The first clue that Gantz is a propagandist comes in his description of Hamas’s motivations. Gantz says that the reason Israel failed to anticipate the Oct. 7th attacks is that they did not understand “the extent to which Hamas was driven by the goal of waging religious war.” Gantz says that “three rationales” were behind the attack: “jihadi fanaticism, an assessment that Israel was at a point of weakness and loyalty to Iran and its axis of evil.” In fact, Hamas’s 2017 charter explicitly disclaims the idea that they are waging a mere “religious war,” instead saying that the group “affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” Hamas says it “does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” And in explaining why the Oct. 7th attack took place, one of Hamas’s political leaders, Basem Naim, said that it was because, as NPR summarizes his comments,

“Palestinians have tried all means, peaceful and armed, to achieve an independent state [but] years of negotiations and even recognition of Israel by other Palestinian parties had failed. Jewish settlements were expanding in the occupied West Bank. A new far-right government was now leading Israel, and another Arab state, Saudi Arabia, was inching closer to establishing ties with Israel.” 

He claims that “we were nearly deleted from the agenda of the region and the international community,” which is certainly true. There is other evidence that the Oct. 7th attacks were in part an effort to thwart the normalization agreements that Israel was making with other Arab countries, which were ignoring Palestinian rights. A different Hamas political leader, Mousa Abu Marzouk, similarly explains Hamas as having primarily political ends, claiming that their “key goals” include the establishment of a Palestinian state, freeing Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, and breaking the siege on Gaza. Now, you might not believe Hamas’s self-representation of their own goals and ideology, and might think that they are in fact simply motivated by a desire to wage holy war. But there needs to be evidence provided, which Gantz makes no effort to offer.

Now, obviously the horrific Oct. 7th attacks were in no way a legitimate, lawful, or humane way to pursue the objective of adding Palestinian rights back to the global agenda. (Unfortunately, more peaceful attempts had been met with brutal repression.) But one has to be accurate: the fact that Hamas has perpetrated horrendous crimes does not mean that they are simply engaged in a fanatical, irrational jihad. They consistently justify their attacks not as a holy war, but as an effort to resist dispossession and occupation. Gantz is a propagandist because instead of acknowledging the complex real-world causes of violence, he portrays the enemy as nothing more than deranged and homicidal. (Violence is the only possible response to such an enemy, of course.) This was precisely the mistake made in the aftermath of 9/11, when terrorism was treated as something done by religious fanatics for no reason other than that they were religious—or, as George W. Bush fatuously put it, because “they hate our freedoms.” We ignored the fact that U.S. foreign policy was itself a major recruiting tool for jihadist organizations, and the perpetrators of terror attacks against the U.S. consistently cited our own violence against Muslims as the reason for their attempts to get revenge.  

Gantz says Hamas is one part of an “axis of evil” (a phrase familiar from earlier war propaganda) led by Iran, which is trying “to annihilate Israel.” If Israel should fall, “a domino effect will ensue” (another phrase familiar from the annals of pro-war propaganda). It has a series of “terrorist armies” that form a “ring of fire,” and is “preparing, building and waiting for the right moment of weakness to pounce.” Thus “the time to act against Iran is now.” 

Gantz does not provide evidence that Iran is actively trying to destroy Israel. In fact, all the evidence is that Iran has been very reluctant to engage in violent confrontation with Israel. Contrary to expectations, Iran did not join in with Hamas in attacking Israel after Oct. 7th, and “Even as millions of Iranians purportedly volunteered online to fight on behalf of the Palestinians, Iran didn't enter the war as an Israeli offensive devastated the Gaza Strip, killing over 41,000 people.” In fact, Iran has been very reluctant to retaliate even when Israel has made major escalations. Iran’s president has been insistent that his country doesn’t want war with Israel and has accused Israel of wanting to drag the country into a war. Iran is in the middle of an economic crisis and so has shown a “focus on engagement and [a] hesitance to intervene on the ground.” So the idea that Iran is posing a major threat is groundless, which is why Gantz cites no sources for his grandiose claims. What is actually going on is that Israel sees a good opportunity here to teach Iran a lesson and curtail its power. But because assertions of dominance are not widely considered good justifications for war, propagandists like Stephens and Gantz have to make the usual claims that aggression is actually defense, done solely to preserve national security.

As usual, the editorial standards of the New York Times are very low. Stephens repeats the claim that Iran has been trying to assassinate Donald Trump, a claim for which no evidence has been provided and which is based on the word of anonymous U.S. officials. (Surely Iraq taught us we should be skeptical of government officials as sources of truth!) Stephens does not, of course, mention the fact that Trump himself claimed the right to assassinate Iranian officials at will. It’s horrifying that arguments for escalating wars can be made in the pages of the newspaper that ignore very basic facts about the conflict. Apparently it’s still permissible to push time-worn myths of implacable, monstrous, cartoonish enemies, or to write out of history all of the inconvenient facts (like the U.S. installation and decades of support for an Iranian dictatorship that its people finally threw off in their 1979 revolution, which partly explains the country’s longstanding bitterness and suspicion toward the U.S.). But if we don’t recall the lessons of the past, and remember how to see through these kinds of manipulations, we may find ourselves dragged into yet another catastrophic, entirely avoidable Middle Eastern conflict. Fool me once, shame on Bush. But if we’re fooled again, it’s shame on us.

For more on what Americans aren’t told about Iran, see our interview with John Ghazvinian.