Late Friday night, Donald Trump announced the beginning of an open-ended war in Iran. In his rambling eight-minute speech, he rattled off a list of real and alleged Iranian crimes going back to the hostage crisis in 1979. He made very little effort, though, to make a case that the country posed such an imminent threat to the United States in 2026 that going to war was his only option. If anything, as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic put it, the war seems so manifestly unnecessary that “even the man waging it doesn’t seem to know why he launched it.”
A week earlier, his ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, sat down for an interview with right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson. I’ve never said a kind word about Carlson before, and I don’t intend to start now, but the interview included a remarkable exchange about public opinion.
Carlson: What percentage of Americans support a war with Iran?
Huckabee: I don’t know. Do you know?
Carlson: I do. I saw the numbers yesterday. I think it was around 21 percent.
Huckabee: Okay.
Carlson: Is that enough to have a war with Iran?
Huckabee: We don’t live in a world where you have a poll taken to find out whether our police should take a particular direction.
This is a level of open indifference to the views of the population that you might expect from an eighteenth-century diplomat working for France’s prerevolutionary ancien régime. Does the overwhelming majority of the public disagree with the king’s decisions? Well, what of it? It’s not up to them!
In the lead-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, he and his administration spent several months working hard to manufacture the consent of the public. In Bush’s State of the Union address, delivered two months before the war began, he devoted dozens of paragraphs to claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) that he might share with al-Qaeda. His vice president, Dick Cheney, darkly warned that if Americans waited…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
