{"id":279924,"date":"2026-09-06T07:22:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T07:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/279924\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T07:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T07:22:10","slug":"the-pro-war-pundits-who-got-iraq-wrong-are-also-getting-iran-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/279924\/","title":{"rendered":"The pro-war pundits who got Iraq wrong are also getting Iran wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

The George W. Bush administration and its camp followers in the media\u00a0sold<\/a>\u00a0the Iraq War with lies and spin. Before the war, hawkish pundits such as CNN host\u00a0Fareed Zakaria<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0New York Times\u00a0columnist\u00a0Thomas L. Friedman<\/a>\u00a0promised that it would bring reform to the Arab world. Once the war started, Fox News host Brit Hume\u00a0gloated<\/a>\u00a0that critics got it “completely wrong,” and his colleague Tony Snow\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0a “relatively bloodless victory”\u2014two statements that aged very badly as the new Iraq collapsed into decades of war, with U.S. troops in the line of fire.<\/p>\n

So it went in Iran. Pro-war journalists and TV talking heads predicted that the Iranian government would collapse at the first push. Once the war started, they ignored signs that things were not going as planned. Unlike the Iraq War, the war in Iran has not turned into a drawn-out insurgency. The U.S. did not even topple the government, instead accepting a ceasefire after four weeks. But that ceasefire did not hold. At press time, the U.S. and Iran were fighting over the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for trade that had been fully open before the war.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Before the U.S. attacked Iran on February 28, a chorus of media personalities, including several with direct lines to President Donald Trump, argued that a war with Iran would\u00a0last only a few days<\/a>.\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0columnist Marc Thiessen\u00a0predicted<\/a>\u00a0that the Iranian government would quickly fall because “the Iranian people are the boots on the ground.” Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies,\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0The\u00a0Hugh Hewitt Show\u00a0that Ali Khamenei, then Iran’s supreme leader, would not fight back because “that’s the end of his regime.” Fox News host Mark Levin\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0Iran physically\u00a0couldn’t\u00a0fight back.<\/p>\n

Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Iran overthrown in the 1979 revolution, was\u00a0frequently featured<\/a>\u00a0on Fox News as a pro-war Iranian voice. Although he had\u00a0some support<\/a>\u00a0among Iranians, the\u00a0suburban dad<\/a>\u00a0formerly known as prince was making wild promises he couldn’t keep. In a February 12\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with the German magazine\u00a0Der Spiegel, Pahlavi urged U.S. intervention, claiming he had recruited an army of 100,000 defectors. Not a single uprising against the Iranian government happened during the war.<\/p>\n

John Podhoretz, heir to the neoconservative magazine\u00a0Commentary, at least admitted that his predictions fell flat. In the first hours of the war, he\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0that the U.S. military would leave “quick work for Iranians themselves to kick the mullahs to the curb.” On a\u00a0Commentary\u00a0podcast four months later, he\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0“there is no person on Earth who is going to say that America didn’t lose the war.”<\/p>\n

Other pundits simply refused to acknowledge when things were not going their way. Week after week, Fox News commentator Jack Keane\u00a0said<\/a> the war would be over in two or three more weeks. Many of these pundits’ arguments were simply an appeal to shut up and trust the leader. In mid-March, retired British Army officer Richard Kemp complained<\/a> in\u00a0The Telegraph\u00a0about an excess of “doom mongering.” The media, he claimed, were simply “not privy” to the genius of Trump’s plans.<\/p>\n

On CNN a few days before the April ceasefire, former Bush administration official Scott Jennings\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0“there is no doubt we have defanged this regime.” Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with the neoconservative Hudson Institute,\u00a0complained<\/a>\u00a0a few days after the ceasefire that the West was ignoring the “lived experience” of Arabs, who she claimed supported the war. Public opinion polling from both\u00a0before<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0after<\/a>\u00a0the war suggested that Arab publics were increasingly rooting for Iran and opposing the war. Riboua also\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0the war was “all about” weakening China by, among other things, eliminating a cheap source of oil. Three months after the ceasefire, China was\u00a0snapping up<\/a>\u00a0discounted oil from Iran’s rivals.<\/p>\n

Soon after the ceasefire, Trump attempted to pressure Iran further by blockading its ports, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies\u00a0published a prediction<\/a>\u00a0that Iran would be forced to shut down its oil wells within 13 days, causing permanent damage. Trump repeated a similar timeline on Fox News, predicting that the wells would\u00a0literally explode<\/a>\u00a0at the end of April. That didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

Many of the cheerleaders for war with Iran were the same people who had cheered on the invasion of Iraq, often with the same arguments. Fox News host Sean Hannity, who\u00a0predicted<\/a>\u00a0in February 2003 that the Iraq War was “going to be over very quickly,”\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0almost exactly the same thing in February 2026: “It’s not going to be a forever war. It’s going to be overwhelming military might and force, and then it’s going to be up to the people of Iran. If they want a chance at freedom, they will have it, I believe, within the next few weeks.”\u00a0New York Times\u00a0columnist Bret Stephens, who bragged in 2023 about his\u00a0lack of regrets<\/a>\u00a0about the Iraq War,\u00a0whined<\/a>\u00a0in March 2026 about “our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.”<\/p>\n

There is a revolving door between hawkish punditry and government work. Benjamin Netanyahu, testifying before the U.S. Congress as a retired prime minister and private citizen in 2002,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0invading Iraq would have “enormous positive reverberations.” Netanyahu, who is once again the prime minister of Israel, helped Trump\u00a0plan the Iran War<\/a>. Back in 2002, Condoleezza Rice, then the U.S. national security adviser, was pushing the false claim that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” she famously\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0CNN. In July 2026, Rice was invited to address the Aspen Security Forum about the new war in Iran. “When I hear, ‘Well, it wasn’t imminent,'” she\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the crowd, “I think, ‘Do you really want to wait until it’s imminent?'”<\/p>\n

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Pundits Got the Iran War Wrong.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The George W. Bush administration and its camp followers in the media\u00a0sold\u00a0the Iraq War with lies and spin.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279925,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[14],"tags":[38,34,94,1684,27541,49,309],"class_list":["post-279924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iraq","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran","tag-iraq","tag-iraq-war","tag-media-criticism","tag-middle-east","tag-trump-administration"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117222896025098918","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}