Are the people as clueless as the Deep State expects them to be?

You have to wonder. Standing on the tarmac in France before meetings with European foreign ministers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained to reporters that for Iran to ever get nuclear weapons would be crazy. “Look what they’re willing to do with the weapons they have now.”

It doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary that a country attacked repeatedly by the most fearsome nation on earth and its companion war provocateur should want to use the weapons in has now in self-defense. Rubio knows who attacked whom and is trafficking in cluelessness on the part of the assembled press.

Recall, too, the ignoble ending that Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi met (Don’t ask; its too revolting) upon giving up his rudimentary nuclear development program as a rapprochement with the United States and United Kingdom. It was not lost on Kim Jong-un that both John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence offered North Korea “the Libya model.” That unappetizing prospect made plain to Kim and others that countries with nuclear deterrence don’t get attacked by the U.S, global military empire.

Satirist H.L. Mencken observed that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the masses of plain people. But they can only take so much, as I am discovering in promoting my new book EMPIRE OF LIES: Fragments from the Memory Hole, which describes the Deep State’s means and methods for stampeding the American people into endless, senseless wars. I have spent much of the last few months going on radio talk shows, television, and podcasts. It has exposed me to a cross-section of American opinion, from news people, show hosts, and their callers and viewers.

Before I go further, let me say that this is not a virginal experience for me, as I have been both a newsman and show host myself and have made similar promotional rounds before. Perhaps the most relevant comparison is with attitudes I discovered in objecting to W. Bush’s elective and disastrous Iraq war.

Both then and now it is discouraging to note how readily people pick up and echo the utterances of Washington’s warmongers and Fox News. These unexamined talking points become memes that spread lightning-like in social media and in popular debate. In the Iraq War it was nonsense like “the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud,” and the equally nonsensical “Axis of Evil,” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Here are three leading memes I have encountered this time around.

First, that Iran has been at war with us for forty-seven years. That talking point might have been stillborn due to the early insistence that what the United States was doing in Iran wasn’t actually a war. For some, like the ever-bellicose Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), it both isn’t a war and they’ve been at war with us for forty-seven years, each asserted in the same breath. Cotton also offered up that Iran has been an “imminent threat” for 47 years. That’s one heck of a long imminence! With the U.S. and Israel having struck some 15,000 Iranian targets in the first month, not to mention the White House suddenly asking for a $200 billion supplemental war appropriation, it has been hard to maintain the fiction that this isn’t a war. Except for some diehards like the president himself, that contention has mostly disappeared.

The 47-year meme evaporates quickly when people are reminded that history didn’t just begin in 1979 and that the CIA helped topple Iran’s elected Mossadegh government in a violent 1953 oil grab. I have written elsewhere about the cruel reign of the Shah that the U.S. installed in Mohammad Mossadegh’s place. The great conservative historian Paul Johnson described our man on the Peacock Throne as “the Persian Stalin.”

My own confession is that as a young man watching the anti-American chanting and flag burning in the streets of Iran during their 1979 revolution, I was puzzled by it. But I had no idea then about the CIA’s deadly tactics in toppling the government, the extent of the Shah’s plunder, the torture his secret police employed, or the belief that our sheltering the Shah was viewed in Iran as a prelude to a U.S. attempt to reinstall the monarchy. But I know now, and many readers know now, too.

There is much more, including the U.S. abetting Iraq’s acquisition of illegal chemical and biological weapons in the long and brutal Iran-Iraq war that began with Iraq’s invasion of Iran. Since the median age in the United States is 39, most Americans are too young to remember the sunny July 1988 morning when the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian international passenger flight over the Persian Gulf. A mistake, “a terrible human tragedy,” said Bush the Elder. Yet it must not be allowed to disappear down the memory hole that H.W. Bush followed the slaughter of those 290 innocent civilians by rewarding the captain of the Vincennes with of the Legion of Merit medal. Time permitting, it is a story worth telling.

Second, that Iran is days away from having nuclear weapons. This days-away, months-away meme is a little more difficult to dislodge. Which is sort of the point: Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling us the same story for twenty-five years.

Look, these any day now claims are useless unless you believe that once Iran has nukes, it would be eager to use them knowing full-well that it would be instantly vaporized by Israel and the United States, for any Iranian first use their incineration would certainly follow. We stood in just such a showdown with the Soviet Union for more than a quarter century; with the retaliatory certainly of an answering second strike, neither side was willing to commit a suicidal launch.

What is often missing in the common debate is the National Intelligence finding and subsequent confirming reports that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons research program in 2003; that in her Annual Threat Assessment last year Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, testified that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon; that the IAEA’s report in February is consistent with the U.S. intelligence finding that there is no credible indications or evidence of Iran conducting a coordinated or structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons; that Iran is certainly not days or weeks away from building a nuclear bomb.

So much for imminence. So much for no time for Congress to consider a constitutional declaration of war.

And third, that Iran is the “head of the snake,” responsible for killing thousands of Americans, more than anyone.

This one has all the signs of being a cultivated talking point disseminated from unknown parties to those willing repeat it verbatim. It appeared succinctly in a prepared statement from Congressman Ken Calvert (R-CA), Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, on February 28 when Operation Epic Fury was announced:

“The Iranian regime is the head of the snake that is responsible for killing thousands of Americans and our allies in the Middle East.”

Here it is again a week later from Congressman Rick Allen (R-GA) in explaining his vote against invoking the War Powers Act:

“Iran is responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist regime in the world.”

In fomenting war on Iran, Tom Cotton rolled out the “head of the snake” metaphor twice in quick succession on the Sean Hannity Show. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), and many others must have gotten the memo and used the phrase.

Oh, and so has Prime Minister Netanyahu. In fact one wouldn’t be surprised if it were discovered that it originated with him.

Is Iran responsible for more American deaths in the terror wars than anyone? The Pentagon cites 603 U.S. deaths from Iranian-backed militias during the eight years of the Iraq war, when our empire of lies blundered its way into a fourteen century-old schism in the Islamic faith. The number of U.S. casualties in W. Bush’s elective war that were Iran- or Shia-related were therefore a small percentage of the 4,400 American deaths in the Iraq War.

In his book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton exhaustively demonstrates that the roadside explosive devices that were creating so many American casualties were made in Iraq by Iraqis from techniques that can be traced back to the Irish Republican Army. Far and away the preponderance of American deaths in Iraq came at the hands of Sunni affiliates, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, and others; even more so was that the case in Afghanistan where the Shia presence is much less. Most Islamic terrorism in the United States has been at the hands of Sunnis, with almost none by Shia.

So here is the good news. My message, the one in my book EMPIRE OF LIES: Fragments from the Memory Hole, is much more welcome today than was my opposition to the Iraq War a generation ago. Even the diehard, rock-ribbed Trump-can-do-no-wrong loyalists, shocked by things I say that they have never heard before, can’t hide their curiosity, although they tend to close their shows with a vague disclaimer, something about needing to hear different points of view. That is so their audiences, there for bias confirmation, don’t suspect them of heresy.   

Nevertheless, the hosts and audiences alike are much more willing to entertain doubts about the Deep State’s aims and manipulations today. The Iran War is not going down well, with either the well-informed or the less-informed.

And why should it? Those too young to know much about the empire’s lies about the John F. Kennedy assassination and Vietnam War, or to have lived through Watergate, “read my lips,” or the meaning of “is,” have at least heard about the hapless W. Bush and the missing WMDs, the mortgage meltdown and wealth transfer, the COVID deceit, haywire regime change wars, the open borders stampede, Hunter’s laptop and Joe Biden’s incapacity. Stated differently, trust in government in not at an all-time high.

The people are not as clueless as the Deep State relies on them being. Surely it must be worried that a reckoning with the betrayal of Trump’s no-more-regime-change-wars platform is unavoidable now. The empty seats at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and the stunning audience applause for impeachment hearings confirm my own experience that the old gang is breaking up.   

A growing number of conservatives and MAGA-types aren’t buying what Donald Trump is selling. But with the world on the brink of an economic precipice and the White House issuing statements like, “President Trump does not bluff. He is prepared to unleash hell. Iran should not miscalculate again,” they may be too late.