As the American people have been spun up and down the War-with-Iran roller-coaster — first beset by dread and then relief as the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani seems not to have led to a descent into full-scale war, at least not yet — we may be forgiven for not realizing that mass manipulation of public sentiment has been the major unexamined story of the last week. To begin with, the Trump administration has pretty clearly lied to the American people about the purpose of the assassination, claiming it was carried out to forestall “imminent” attacks that officials are unwilling and unable to provide evidence for. Rather, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias writes, “the administration instead simply made a calculated decision to escalate American pushback on Iran as part of a larger series of back-and-forth actions that began with the US pullout from the Iran nuclear deal.” Yglesias points to the influence of administration members and others who want war with Iran, and who see provoking Iran into a cycle of escalation as a way of producing the desired outcome: by lying to Americans about the real purpose of our attacks on Iran, and provoking Iranian responses to American attacks, the Trump administration is relying on basic dynamics of public opinion to help make its case for war.
In other words, the Trump administration is arguably not only trying to foment a war with Iran, but to prevent the American people from realizing this is what they’re doing. And in keeping vital information from us, they’re also telling us that we don’t really have a role to play in deciding whether to go to war.
Now, it’s within the realm of possibility that President Trump doesn’t want a full-blown conflict with Iran. After all, as this New York Times overview of the last week describes, the administration was careful to communicate to Iran the desire to avoid further escalation following the assassination, and did not seize on Iran’s retaliatory missile attacks against U.S. air bases in Iraq as an excuse for further violence. But even if the killing of General Soleimani was intended as a reasonable response to earlier Iranian provocations, such as the violent protests at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, this still opens up the possibility of an unstoppable cycle of violence, despite this actually being the U.S.’ intent. And so in even this more benign reading of events, we are being told that events that might easily lead to war are somehow not a matter to be decided by the American people through their representatives in Congress. This is clearly neither in the public interest nor in the spirit of the American constitution, which reserves to Congress the decision to declare war.
A second glaring manipulation of the past week is the president’s clear intent to use action against Iran to boost his political position. It strains credulity to think that throwing sand in the gears of the impeachment effort was not a consideration in his decision-making; certainly, this is an angle that congressional Republicans have not been afraid to play up, as they hammered Democrats for making the president look weak by pursuing impeachment during a national security crisis. And we are beginning to see firmer evidence that impeachment was a factor in the president’s decision-making; for example, the Times piece states that Trump “told some associates that he wanted to preserve the support of Republican hawks in the Senate in the coming impeachment trial, naming Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas as an example.” Given the lies already exposed about the administration’s intentions toward Iran, Democrats need to uncover any evidence that the president is using war to nullify the impeachment effort. If there’s sufficient evidence, this should be added to the articles of impeachment.
A third thread of the manipulation narrative is the Republicans’ alacrity in using the Iran conflict as a cudgel for accusing the Democrats of being unpatriotic, and worse. In other words, an event seemingly calling for national unity was seized on by the GOP as an opportunity to divide America into patriots and traitors. As some pundits have already noted, Democrats were quick to push back against these attacks. But what’s remarkable is the way that the GOP slipped so quickly into a familiar pattern of attempting to leverage national security issues into a way to smear Democrats with preposterous claims.
And this leads me to the fourth facet of this week’s manipulations: the media’s default coverage of national security and international events as a realm far more divorced from domestic politics than it actually is. This is perhaps less of an overt manipulation than those I’ve already described, but it’s a framing that nonetheless ends up promoting something untrue: making the public believe that the government is acting in its interests at least to some degree because the actions are taking place abroad. In other words, more than in the domestic arena, President Trump’s actions are given the benefit of the doubt as being in the national rather than his personal interests. In this sense, Trump is exploiting the wide latitude for action overseas exploited by presidents over the past 70-plus years, and increasingly since 9/11.
But just as George W. Bush saw the Iraq invasion as a way to assure his re-election — it was, after all, clearly a war of choice — we can also see how President Obama’s initial escalation of a pointless war in Afghanistan was driven by a need to appear tough to domestic critics (if you have not already, please check the staggering Washington Post Afghanistan Papers series on the lies both the Bush and Obama administrations relied on to maintain a U.S. presence in that country). So even as the wars following 9/11 should have shattered the idea that foreign policy is somehow a realm where the president should be accorded wide latitude in his or her decision-making, the media has broadly covered it as an ethereal realm where the president’s actions are by default thought to be selfless and pure. Given all we know of Donald Trump’s subordination of American interests to those of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other foreign governments in other areas, to give him any benefit of the doubt signals that the lessons of both the past few decades and the past three years are being ignored in favor of a fictitious selflessness on the part of the president when it comes to matters of war and peace. This is extremely dangerous for our country, and in no way serves the public interest.
Indeed, the overarching offense that ties together the various manipulations I’ve been describing may be the president’s exploitation of Americans’ good faith belief that the president will act in their interest. That is, manipulation is only possible because many Americans still behave in a rational, patriotic way; despite so many experiences to the contrary, it still seems outlandish that a president would abuse powers of life and death, war and peace, for the wrong reasons. Whether it’s the president lying to the public about the reasons for conflict with Iran, the GOP’s contention that Democrats are standing in the way of the national defense, or the media’s inclination to suggest a hard divide between domestic politics and foreign affairs, such efforts are premised on the basic credulity of the American people regarding the ethical behavior of their government. One of the tragedies of our moment is that so many Americans continue to extend such faith, even when we’ve had so much evidence that our leaders will be ruthless in taking advantage of it; but as I’ve tried to describe above, it’s clear that the efforts to confuse and manipulate us are pervasive.