COUNTERPUNCH - March 6, 2026 - Lies and Doublespeak on Iran - David S. D’Amato

 COUNTERPUNCH

March 6, 2026

Lies and Doublespeak on Iran

David S. D’Amato

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

If you’re confused about why the United States is at war with Iran, you are not alone. Earlier this week, on Monday, Secretary of State Rubio suggested that Israel had led the U.S. into this war, stating that Israel was planning to attack Iran and thus that American military assets in the region would have been at risk whether we joined or not.

Secretary Rubio, who also serves as national security advisor, suggested that the fact of Israel’s planned strikes ultimately determined the timing of American involvement: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties….”

This is what a lawless empire wants: total confusion not only about the rules that govern when we go to war, but about the objectives themselves and, indeed, the question of whether or not particular military actions against another sovereign state are even regarded as “war.”

As Andrew Roth wrote in The Guardian,

There were two corollaries from that bombshell behind the largest US military intervention in a generation. First, that senior US officials had misled the public on Saturday when they warned of intelligence about Iran’s plans to launch a preemptive strike. And second, that Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu played a far larger role in prompting the US to launch strikes against Iran than was previously admitted.

The lies have apparently gotten a lot lazier since the catastrophic George W. Bush years gave us long, enormously costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump, Rubio, Hegseth and the gang barely bother to try.

On Tuesday, during a meeting with German Chancellor Merz at the White House, President Trump appeared to contradict Rubio directly, saying, “No, I might have forced their [Israel’s] hand,” adding that it was his opinion that Iran planned on preemptively attacking U.S. assets first. Trump’s remark was an attempt to revive the lie the administration had delivered over the weekend, that they had credible intelligence of a preemptive Iranian attack. If the reasons for this new war have not been made clear, what is much clearer is that Donald Trump and his cabinet neither care about the reasons or have any respect for the people.

Similar contradictory and confusing statements have characterized the administration’s reasons for waging war against Iran. The administration, to say nothing of various Republican members of Congress, has gone back and forth on whether the goal is regime change or to permanently disarm the country’s military, and what indeed that would mean. Rubio also said on Monday that no law requires the president to obtain permission from Congress to go to war, and that “no presidential administration has ever accepted the War Power Act as constitutional.” That law begins in part by stating,

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

It took effect in the fall of 1973, after the House and the Senate overrode an attempted veto by President Nixon. In the absence of a congressional declaration of war – the clear requirement of the Constitution itself – the law requires a report to Congress within 48 hours of a military engagement (the full text of the reporting requirement is here). For his part, Trump’s wet rag, House Speaker Mike Johnson, has said that there should be no vote and that subjecting Donald Trump’s war to any congressional test would unnecessarily tie his hands.

The U.S. government has taken hundreds of aggressive military actions around the world since the last time Congress declared war during World War II, many if not most of which were clearly acts of war under any reasonable or commonsense definition. Some Republican members of Congress now even point to this long history of illegal wars as evidence of the fact that their job is to sit on their hands and do nothing, aligning with Rubio’s attempt to brush aside any substantive congressional role.

Without a clearly defined goal, it is hard to see how or when this war could end, and Secretary Hegseth has said that we’re just getting started. The administration’s claims notwithstanding, an issue brief published this week by the Arms Control Association restates what experts have repeated again and again: that Iran’s nuclear and missile programs did not pose an imminent threat, and that “the Trump administration did not engage in good-faith negotiations with Iran over the past several weeks and exhaust diplomatic options to reach an agreement to limit future risks posed by the nuclear and missile programs.”

This is another American war of choice for spurious and ill-defined reasons, another violation of both international law and the Constitution. Six American soldiers have already lost their lives to this war (the names of four have now been released: Cody A. Khork, Noah L. Tietjens, Nicole M. Amor, and Declan J. Coady), and thousands of Americans are stranded in the region. This is to say nothing of the hundreds of innocents killed in Iran, whose lives are no less intrinsically precious than ours as Americans.

For all the talk of Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs, it is their low-cost, one-way drones that have been remarkably difficult for the United States’ expensive defense systems to stop. During a briefing earlier this week, Defense Secretary Hegseth and General Caine, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted, according to reports, that Iran’s Shahed drones “are posing a bigger problem than anticipated.” These are the very drones that the U.S. military reverse-engineered to create its LUCAS copycat. The Pentagon has clearly been surprised by the strength and endurance of the Iranian response, but it is not at all clear why Iran’s retaliations should have caught them so flat-footed. This asymmetric dynamic has been a known factor for years, and “while the price of one Shahed is estimated to be $30,000 to $50,000, one interceptor can cost 10 times that or more while exhausting already dwindling stockpiles.” While the military-industrial complex, which has never been designed to keep Americans safe, is optimized for extremely expensive, high-tech and high-margin weapons systems, the Pentagon has had to race to catch up to cheap and disposable Iranian drones.

The Iranian government correctly sees this moment as an existential crisis, the end of the line, and the regime in Tehran shares Washington’s lack of regard for civilian life. Ultimately, what emerges from the Trump administration’s feckless flood of lies and contradictions is clarity on at least one thing. The U.S. government has abandoned even the thinnest notion of legal or democratic accountability around its decision to start yet another war of choice.

None of this, from the ever-shifting rationales, to the open contempt for the people’s representatives to the apparent surprise at Iran’s counterattacks, should any longer surprise us, and it follows directly from our experiences with past presidents.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.