War is a mere continuation of Trump lying to Americans
- Rich Moniak
- 19 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
On Wednesday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted against a War Powers Resolution that would have directed President Donald Trump to end U.S. Armed Forces involvement in the war against Iran. She’s certainly right that he “should have sought authorization from Congress before striking Iran on this scale.” And I agree with her argument that an “abrupt cessation of all offensive operations” would be a mistake.
But the idea those operations are necessary “to degrade and destroy Iran’s capability for nuclear weapons” can only be true if Trump lied in June when he declared that their “key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Murkowski voted against a similar after-the-fact resolution following that brief bombing mission. Her reasoning then was the Trump administration made the case that it was carried out because of “an imminent threat to regional stability and U.S. personnel.”
Middle East stability is sort of an oxymoron. On June 13, Israel inflamed the situation by launching an air offensive against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran responded with missile attacks against Israeli targets.
Iran did not attack U.S. personnel in the region until after we joined the war.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed the U.S. bombing resulted in "extremely severe damage and destruction," to Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities but cautioned that it was “way too early" to know for sure.
And a leaked initial assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated the attack only set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back a few months.
If Murkowski trusted those doubts more than Trump’s boastful conclusions, then allowing this current war to continue makes a little more sense.
But it doesn’t explain away another bunch of White House inconsistencies.
Less than two months after the June bombing, Trump turned his attention to the western hemisphere. The U.S. military began blowing up speedboats off the coast of Venezuela that were allegedly carrying drugs and cartel members. By November, 11 US warships and 15,000 troops had moved into the region. In January, they executed a mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro.
That and the foolish saber-rattling over Greenland that followed suggests Trump’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear weapons program had waned.
New negotiations to halt it began on Feb. 6.
On Feb. 21, his lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff, stated Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial grade bomb making material.”
Trump took us to war on Feb. 28. That day he announced Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei had been killed. "He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems,” Trump said, “and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do.”
On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chimed in to clarify it wasn’t “a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change.”
Also on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that an Israel plan to attack Iran “would precipitate an attack against American forces.” He said Trump realized “if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties."
Trump insisted that he, not Israel, initiated the war because he “felt strongly” Iran was planning to attack first.
That led Rubio to walk back his comments on Tuesday. But he also said they started the war on a day that “presented a unique opportunity to take joint action against” the threat.
Also on Tuesday, Trump returned to Witkoff's theme. If the U.S. didn’t attack “right now,” he said, “you would have had a nuclear war, and they would have taken out many countries.”
But reporting by the NY Times then Axios points to Rubio’s statements as the most plausible explanation for why they decided to start bombing last Saturday. The CIA and Israeli intelligence may have known the specific time and location that Khamenei and several military leaders would be gathered together in Tehran.
All we know at this point is some people in Trump’s administration aren’t telling the truth. And that’s not news.
It’s often been said that truth is the first casualty of war. But to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is a mere continuation of Trump’s policy of lying to Americans.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
