The propaganda machine is running at full throttle, spewing a torrent of misinformation designed to justify the unprovoked Israeli attack on Iran and the likely deeper involvement of the United States. If the last two decades of Western-led wars have taught us anything, it’s that war doesn’t begin with bombs, it begins with lies. And right now, the same disinformation playbook used to sell the Iraq invasion is being dusted off, rebranded, and redeployed in service of yet another disastrous Middle Eastern war.
At the center of the latest falsehood is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s baseless claim that Iran was on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon. Without any substantiating evidence, he accused Tehran of genocidal intent, invoking Iran’s peaceful nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel. Ironically, Israel itself possesses a large, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons, refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and currently stands accused of committing genocide in Gaza while its leaders regularly engage in open, genocidal rhetoric.
Netanyahu’s invocation of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is not only unconvincing, it’s an exhausted trope. He has been peddling the same “Iran is a year away from a nuke” line since the 1990s. Over and over, the calendar has debunked him. Even the United States intelligence community has publicly stated there is no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Just weeks before the attack, U.S. intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard confirmed to Congress that Iran had not resumed its suspended weapons program and that no such directive had come from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei since the early 2000s.
Iranian scientists themselves have voiced frustration over their government’s ban on pursuing nuclear weapons. If anything, this indicates the Islamic Republic is deliberately avoiding the nuclear weapons path, adhering to both religious and strategic constraints. Yet none of this matters to Netanyahu or his allies, who are determined to create a casus belli for war.
Enter the U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who, rather than making a concrete assertion, mumbled about “plenty of indications” that Iran was “moving toward something that would look like a nuclear weapon.” This vague, legally meaningless language was immediately seized upon by hawks like Senator Tom Cotton and right-wing pundits such as Mark Levin, who twisted it into a declarative accusation. It’s a classic example of war-by-inuendo, one unsupported by facts but amplified through repetition until it feels true.
The campaign to demonize Iran doesn’t stop there. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, long known for his Pentagon-sourced “scoops,” has revived the Iraq-era fantasy of Tehran collaborating with al-Qaeda, citing supposed ties between Iran and Saif al-Adel, the terror group’s de facto leader. This narrative mimics the same lie that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda, a falsehood that helped trigger a war which left Iraq in ruins and destabilized the entire region.
At the same time, pro-Trump talking heads are pushing the xenophobic delusion that Iranian “sleeper cells” are embedded across the United States. Fringe agitators like Laura Loomer have suggested, without a shred of evidence, that there are “millions” of operatives just waiting for orders from Tehran. Such claims aren’t just false, they’re fantastical to the point of absurdity, implying that entire cities would be Iranian agents in disguise. The goal is clear: to whip up fear, hysteria, and Islamophobia among a war-weary but still manipulable American public.
All of these lies, nuclear panic, sleeper cells, al-Qaeda ties, are not isolated. They are coordinated threads in a manufactured tapestry of fear. They are meant to overwrite facts with fantasy, to drown reason in raw emotion, and to stampede public opinion into supporting yet another endless war in the Middle East. We’ve seen it before: Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, all cases where the American public was misled into accepting mass violence in the name of false security.
But this time, the stakes are even higher. Iran is not a soft target. It is a nation of over 80 million people, with a robust military, ballistic missile capability, advanced drone technology, and strong alliances with non-state actors across the region. A war with Iran will not be a “surgical strike.” It will be a regional inferno, one that could engulf the Strait of Hormuz, crash the global economy, and possibly ignite World War III.
So let’s be clear: this war was not started because Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat. It was started because Israel is losing its grip on the global narrative. With international protests growing over its atrocities in Gaza, and mounting criticism from human rights experts, Tel Aviv needed a distraction, an escalation that would reframe it as the perpetual victim under existential threat. And once Iran responds, as it inevitably must, the media chorus will thunder with cries of “aggression,” whitewashing the fact that it was Israel that launched the first strike.
The lies are coming fast and furious. And they will keep coming, through op-eds, anonymous intelligence leaks, viral posts, and primetime talking points. Every new headline, every vague assertion from a senator or general, should be treated with rigorous skepticism. These are not neutral observers, they are part of the war apparatus.
The public must resist being gaslit again. The price of believing these lies will not be borne by Netanyahu or Hegseth or Cotton. It will be borne by Iranian civilians, by Israeli conscripts, by American soldiers, and by innocent people across the Middle East who have already endured decades of Western-engineered instability.
We are not just being lied to. We are being manipulated into accepting, even cheering, a war that serves no one but weapons manufacturers, imperialists, and a regime in Tel Aviv desperate to escape accountability. Believe nothing without hard evidence. Question every claim. And most of all, refuse to be a pawn in yet another war of lies.
By Hon. Chimazuru Nnadi-Oforgu
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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