Here’s How the Government Will Sell Us the Iran War
Same story, different gulf
The first time I heard anyone in the Bush administration mention Iraq, in 2002, I knew they were going to invade it. Lately, certain members of the Trump administration have been talking the same way about Iran, and just recently some fortuitous incidents have handed them a convenient casus belli. So this essay is for the benefit of readers for whom what’s going to happen over the next months might seem bizarre, horrific, or inexplicable if you aren’t old enough to have lived through it before, or read enough to know that it’s a syndrome with an etiology as predictable as that of any other disease. In fact, it’s one of the commonest civilizational afflictions, the equivalent of the cold, one that’s been documented since history began.
Here’s how this goes.
The government wants to attack another country. They have a real reason and an official reason. The real reason is something pragmatic, mercenary: resources (oil), strategic position, political advantage. Sometimes it’s just to help win an election at home. The official reason will be something to appeal to popular sentiment, ostensibly noble but ultimately primal: honor, revenge, race hatred, fear. It’s not really necessary that people believe this official reason; only that it be plausible enough that they…
