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If Iran Kills US Troops, the Blame Rests Solely on the US and Israel

by | Featured, Winter 2026

Reading by Tim Foley:

White House officials reportedly want Israel to provoke Iran into attacking US military bases in the region, because it will make Americans more willing to go to war.

Politico reports:

Senior advisers to President Donald Trump would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country, according to two people familiar with ongoing discussions.

These Trump administration officials are privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a U.S. strike.

The calculus is a political one — that more Americans would stomach a war with Iran if the United States or an ally were attacked first. Recent polling shows that Americans, and Republicans in particular, support regime change in Iran, but are unwilling to risk any U.S. casualties to achieve it. That means Trump’s team is considering the optics of how an attack is conducted in addition to other justifications — such as Iran’s nuclear program.

“There’s thinking in and around the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first and alone and the Iranians retaliate against us, and give us more reason to take action,” an anonymous White House source told Politico.

So according this report the plan is to let Israel initiate the war, draw out an aggressive Iranian response against Israel and US military assets in the area, and then let the media saturate American airwaves with photographs of slain US soldiers so that Americans will support a new war in the middle east.

As a plan to drum up domestic support for war, it would probably work. Israel would certainly be all too happy to initiate another war. The US media would certainly be all too happy to drum up support for American retaliation. And many Americans, God bless them, would be dumb enough to swallow it.

We all saw how easily the American public can be persuaded to sign off on any US military operation after 9/11. We know the drill: Americans get killed, the imperial propaganda machine kicks into hyperdrive, and all of a sudden you’ve got every war plan and domestic surveillance agenda ever dreamed up by Washington’s nastiest swamp monsters being advanced at breakneck pace.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is already laying the groundwork for this narrative push, literally doing the “look how close they put their country to our military bases” meme during a press conference on Wednesday.

“Iran possesses a very large number of ballistic missiles, particularly short-range ballistic missiles that threaten the United States and our bases in the region and our partners in the region, and all of our bases in the UAE, in Qatar, in Bahrain,” Rubio said. “And they also possess naval assets that threaten shipping and try to threaten the U.S. Navy. So I want everybody to understand that, and beyond just the nuclear program they possess these conventional weapons that are solely designed to attack America and attack Americans, if they so choose to do so.”

They’re already blatantly lying to the American public about this thing. In addition to the propaganda narratives we discussed recently like Steve Witkoff claiming Iran is “probably a week away” from having the materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb and The New York Post publishing evidence-free atrocity propaganda about Iran cutting out the reproductive organs of female protesters, President Trump falsely claimed during his State of the Union address on Tuesday that Iran refuses to say it will never develop a nuclear weapon.

“We are in negotiations with them; they want to make a deal but we haven’t heard those secret words: We will never have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said during his speech before Congress.

As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp pointed out, Iran has been explicitly saying they will never develop a nuclear weapon this entire time, and they literally said it again on the day of Trump’s speech. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi tweeted on Tuesday that “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

Whether or not you believe Iran’s claims that it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons, it is an indisputable fact that Trump and his speech writers brazenly lied to the American public about Iran refusing to say the words “We will never have a nuclear weapon.”

 

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