Why Are We in Iran?

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

As the war in Viet Nam droned on and on and on between President Lyndon Johnson’s dramatic escalation in 1965 and the fall of Saigon 10 years later, an increasingly world-weary American public began asking the question, “Why are we in Viet Nam?” Even Norman Mailer used the phrase as the title of a novel published in 1967, though it’s about a teenager hunting in Alaska with his father and the book’s only connection with Viet Nam is that at its end, the son announces that he’s leaving to fight in the war.

Similarly, Americans these days are asking, “Why are we in Iran?” They have been since February 28, when President Donald Trump, in keeping with his usual shock-and-awe tactics through which he’s manipulated not only the rest of the world but the American people, suddenly launched air raids on the Islamic Republic of Iran in coalition with Israel. The raids killed members of Iran’s ruling elite, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the Israelis threatened to murder anyone the Iranians appointed to replace him – including Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, who was picked to take over.

Trump and his officials have offered myriad explanations for why the U.S. chose to attack Iran at this time, and also the connection between America and Israel. At some points the explanation was that Ali Khamenei had ordered the slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters in the streets of Tehran and Iran’s other major cities, which rang hollow given that agents of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) goon squads have been killing unarmed protesters themselves in Minneapolis and other American cities.

At other times Trump has offered the preposterous explanation that Iran was getting ready to attack the U.S. – which it wasn’t, and couldn’t even if it had wanted to. He said it was to make sure Iran never developed a nuclear weapon – just seven months after he boasted that a previous but more limited U.S./Israel bomb raid on Iran had “completely obliterated” their nuclear program. Trump also said that it was to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile capability. Iran does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles, though they’ve used the missiles they do have quite effectively to retaliate against U.S. military bases, embassies and other locations in Arab countries.

So why is the U.S. suddenly involved in a major war with Iran? And it is a war, despite the current attempts of the Trump administration to walk back on the term. Just as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, one of Trump’s great role models, said his war against Ukraine wasn’t a war but a “special military operation” – Putin even made it a crime, punishable by 15 years in prison, for any Russian to call his war a “war” – so Trump has rather blandly labeled it an “excursion,” as if it were a vacation cruise.

Trump’s Forgotten Promise Not to Launch “Forever Wars”

Donald Trump is not the first U.S. President to get elected (or re-elected) on a promise of peace and then break it when he took office. Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.” Just one month after his second term began, he was asking Congress for a declaration of war against Imperial Germany and its allies in World War I.

Likewise Lyndon Johnson, running for a full term of his own after having taken over as President following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, promised he would not, as he put it, “send American boys to do what Asian boys should do” in fighting the Viet Nam war. Then in 1965 he dramatically increased the U.S. troop presence again and again, until by 1968 – when he withdrew from his re-election campaign – there were half a million U.S. servicemembers in Viet Nam.

But it seems especially shocking coming from Donald Trump, who despite his appalling record of dishonesty and dissimulation in just about everything else had been consistent on at least one thing: his opposition to “forever wars,” the quagmires that U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq became. Trump won the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016 partly because he was the only Republican candidate who promised not to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid (though the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” he pushed through Congress on party-line votes cut both Medicare and Medicaid), and partly because he decisively rejected the neoconservative consensus that the U.S. should use its military to impose more congenial governments in other countries.

Trump learned one major lesson from his time out of office between 2021 and 2025. In his first term he had appointed a number of Cabinet secretaries and other officials who were from the usual Republican apparat. Many of them tried to talk him out of doing the crazy and illegal things he wanted to do, like set up massive detention centers for so-called “illegal immigrants” (in practice the Trump dragnets have swept up not only legal residents but U.S. citizens) or use the military to seize voter rolls.

Now he’s surrounded himself with spectacularly incompetent people whose only qualification for their jobs is absolute fealty to Donald Trump. His demand for personal loyalty became apparent in 2017, when he abruptly fired then-FBI director James Comey. According to statements Comey released at the time, Trump had got disillusioned with him because, asked by Trump for a pledge of “loyalty,” Comey said he’d be loyal to the U.S. constitution and laws, but not to Trump personally.

His current Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense (whom Trump insists on calling “Secretary of War” even though Congress changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense in 1947 and therefore it would take an act of Congress to change it back) Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and (until recently) Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, are a bunch of no-account losers I’ve compared to the residents of the “Island of Misfit Toys” in the TV cartoon special Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

In looking at Trump’s Cabinet appointees, I’ve frequently thought of the complaint Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, often made privately to Adolf Hitler. Goebbels pleaded with the Führer to hire people who were actually good in their jobs instead of just people with “low Party numbers” – people who had joined the Nazi movement early on and whom Hitler therefore considered personally reliable. Goebbels got absolutely nowhere with Hitler on this (though sometimes Hitler lucked out, like when he hired as his armaments minister his personal friend, architect Albert Speer, whose genius for coordinating defense production arguably kept the war going for two years longer than it would have without him).

Is the War on Iran a Religious War?

Not long ago the slightly liberal cable news network MS NOW ran a report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epBcjVsJ_sU) suggesting that Trump’s motivation for the war on Iran may be Biblical in origin. It showed Pete Hegseth telling the National Prayer Breakfast February 5, “America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it. And as public officials we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify Him. [Points upward at the sky.] … We talk a lot about ‘peace through strength.’ At the War Department [sic], we see ourselves as the Strength Department. But we also need to remember that we derive our strength through faith, and through truth, and through the word of God.”

The report also quoted a story in the British newspaper The Guardian saying that an organization called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been receiving an unprecedented number of complaints about U.S. officers indoctrinating their troops with Christian propaganda in connection with the war in Iran. The Guardian reported that a commanding officer told his soldiers that the war was “all part of God’s divine plan,” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.” Other commanders may not be quite so specific about it, but apparently the orders to the troops are full of references to the “end times” and claims that the war against Iran is Biblically sanctioned.

Pete Hegseth wears the mantle of Christian warrior on his body – literally. His chest is emblazoned with a tattoo containing the so-called “Jerusalem cross,” actually a series of cross-like designs used as the flag of the kingdom of “Christian Jerusalem” established by the First Crusade in 1099. An actual Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, had an idea of America diametrically opposed to Hegseth’s claim that “America was founded as a Christian nation.” In an 1805 letter to the Barbary pirates, essentially the Islamic terrorists of their day, Jefferson said, “America is in no way founded on the Christian religion.”

Why the Founders Didn’t Want a Standing Army

One of the bizarre ways in which the American experiment has deviated big-time from the design of the framers of the Constitution is the whole idea, specified in Article II, section 2, that the President is “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” The authors of the Constitution never thought that this power would last 24/7 throughout the President’s term!

Instead, they set up a process by which it would be Congress that decided when, and with whom, the United States would be at war. Then, and only then, would the President’s Commander-in-Chief power come into play. Throughout the history of the U.S., especially since World War II (the last one the U.S. fought under an actual, Constitutionally mandated declaration of war), Congress has gradually ceded more and more of that power to the executive.

Donald Trump has flatly ended Congress’s role in war-making altogether. In an interview last January with The New York Times (which, by the way, he is suing for $10 billion), he said that the only constraint on his power to send the U.S. to war any time he feels like it, against any enemy he feels like attacking, is “my own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He went on to concede “I do” in regards to whether his administration needed to adhere to international law, but said: “It depends on what your definition of international law is.”

He's already put that doctrine into practice with his unilateral takeover of the government of Venezuela. Trump sent U.S. armed forces to “arrest” Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, kidnap him, and hold him in New York for “trial.” He then installed Maduro’s vice-president, Delci Rodriguez, as the new president of Venezuela on condition that she do whatever he tells her to (much to the disgust of many Venezuelans, who had hoped Maduro would be replaced by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whom Trump sidelined out of jealousy that she, not he, had won the most recent Nobel Peace Prize). Rodriguez obviously has a lot of experience sucking up to dictators; she got to be vice-president sucking up to Maduro and president sucking up to Trump.

According to some reports, it was precisely the ease with which Trump was able effectively to conquer Venezuela that encouraged him to attempt the same thing with Iran. The population of Venezuela is estimated at between 31 million and 35 million people; that of Iran is over 92 million. Iran has a long and proud heritage of defending itself and fighting for its liberty and freedom since the Persian Empire 2,500 years ago. And instead of a weak kleptocracy like Venezuela’s, Iran has a well-organized command-and-control structure centered around the Council of Experts, which elects the Supreme Leader, and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

By chance, years ago I read an interview in Foreign Affairs magazine with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and he seemed like a thoughtful, intelligent person. I don’t recall much of what he actually said, and certainly Iran under his rule was not a good place for the values I believe in: religious liberty, personal freedom, the rule of law, women’s rights, and Queer rights. (Ironically, Iran was one of the easiest countries in the world to obtain gender-confirmation surgery because the government equated Queer and Trans people and assumed that if you were having sex with people of your own gender, you were “really” a member of the opposite one.)

So I wasn’t quite willing to join the chorus of approval of Khamenei’s death and declare that the world is a better place without him. And by all accounts, his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, is even harder-line and less inclined to liberalize. Then again, Mojtaba was reportedly injured on the first day of the U.S./Israeli attack, and Israel has vowed to kill anyone the Iranians appoint as a new Supreme Leader. Trump called on the people of Iran to seize the opportunity to rise up and create a new government free of clerical domination, but the repressive apparatus is still very much in place and anyone trying to take Trump up on his challenge risks near-certain death at the hands of the IRGC.

Opinion Polls, Fox News, and the Danger of a Standing Army

So far, most of the public opinion polling on the Iran war has shown the American people decidedly against it, usually by margins of 10 percent (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/polls-show-what-americans-think-about-the-war-in-iran). One outlier has been the poll from Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-views-divided-us-action-against-iran), which shows the public as dead-even in their views of the Iran war: 50 percent support it and 50 percent oppose it.

Other numbers from the Fox poll show more dangerous trends. People who’ve actually served in the U.S. military are nearly 20 percent more likely than the general public to support the war (59 to 39 percent). Fareed Zakaria discussed these results on CNN and cited another poll which indicated that among voters who’d never served in the U.S. military, Kamala Harris won by nine points over Trump in the 2024 election. But Trump won among people who had served in the military by 20 points, and that was enough to return him to the White House.

This is a good illustration of why the framers of the Constitution didn’t want the U.S. to have a permanent full-time military. Their idea was that the U.S. would rely on state militias for its defense. That is the real reason for the Second Amendment, the only article in the Bill of Rights that has a qualifier attached (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”). Just as the framers never envisioned the President’s commander-in-chief power as extending through his entire term, they neither foresaw nor wanted the U.S. to have a permanent military establishment.

The record of Latin American countries in general proves the justice of the framers’ position, even though modern advances in war-fighting technology have rendered it impractical. Throughout the last 200 years, ever since the nations of Central and South America won their independence from Spain and Portugal, the biggest single threat to their liberty and freedom has come from their militaries. Over and over again, in country after country, Latin American militaries have overthrown democratically elected leaders and installed violently repressive dictatorships, sometimes with U.S. help (Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973).

Until the early 1970’s, the American military – at least those parts of that actually saw combat – was part and parcel of the overall population. The abolition of the draft and its replacement by the “all-volunteer army” severed that connection. According to a May 2025 survey by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) (https://www.dvidshub.net/news/511917/survey-shows-growing-gap-between-civilians-military), “Just one-half of 1 percent of Americans served in uniform at any given time during the past decade – the longest period of sustained conflict in the country’s history,” the report says. “Meanwhile, as the military shrinks in size, the connections between military members and the broader civilian population appear to be growing more distant.”

According to the DVIDS survey, the older you are, the more likely you are to have a relative or friend who is serving or served in the military. “More than three-quarters of civilian adults ages 50 and older reported having an immediate family member – a spouse, parent, sibling or child ¬– who served or serves in the military,” the report said. “For many, that service took place before the end of the draft and the introduction of the all-volunteer force in 1973. Only 57 percent of civilian respondents ages 30 to 49 said they had an immediate family member who served. The percentage dropped to one-third among respondents ages 18 to 29.”

Another statistic that shows a worrisome disconnect between America’s military and its civilian population is party affiliation. According to the DVIDS survey, “Seventy-three percent of Republicans, 59 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Independents said an immediate family member served in the military.” Coupled with racial disparities (the report indicated that 68 percent of whites have a family member who served or is serving, versus 59 percent of African-Americans and only 30 percent Latino/as), these statistics suggest that the U.S. military is becoming a caste unto itself, whiter and more Right-wing than the nation it is supposedly protecting. This is the stuff of which coups are potentially made.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution were worried about the dangers a standing military posed to democracy for just that reason. When you have a social force that is different politically and socially from the population as a whole, you have a force that can fatefully undermine and ultimately stop any experiment in self-governance. And that’s especially true when the force is also the part of society that has the arms, the authority to use them, and the license from the state to maintain order and fight wars both at home and abroad.

Remember Donald Trump’s claim during the 2024 campaign that the real danger to the U.S. was “the enemy within.” He fulfilled that statement by winning enormous sums of money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, making sure their “training” did not include sessions about the need to obey the Constitution, and giving them virtually unlimited authority to do whatever they wanted. In the wake of the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and CBP agents, respectively, in Minneapolis, Vice-President J. D. Vance gave a speech in which he said those agents had “absolute immunity” for any crimes they may commit while serving.

So What Are We Doing in Iran?

There have been innumerable explanations offered for why the Trump administration decided unilaterally to invade Iran. As I noted above, the idea that we were doing it to safeguard the rights of Iranians to protest their government rings hollow coming from an administration that not only kills its own peaceful protesters but slanders them after they’re dead as “domestic terrorists.” The argument that the attack was needed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and/or the missile systems to deliver one also rings hollow, given that the Obama administration had negotiated a diplomatic deal to do just that, and Trump withdrew from it in his first term.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was already going to do so and they invited the U.S. to join it. A day later Trump said that was B.S. – if anything, he said, it was the U.S. that brought in Israel, not the other way around. But it was the thesis behind a PBS Frontline documentary aired March 10, “Remaking the Middle East” (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/remaking-the-middle-east-israel-vs-iran/), whose producer/director/writer, James Jacoby, used footage he’s been collecting for years to argue that Benjamin Netanyahu had wanted to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability since he first took power in Israel 30 years ago, and Trump – unlike Obama or Joe Biden – took up his challenge.

Another reason that’s been advanced is that Trump is following Shakespeare’s advice to end domestic dissent through a strategy to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” Trump is already compromised by the gradual drip-drip-drip release of the files on the late pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, including the allegation from one of Epstein’s victims that Trump literally tried to rape her when she was 14. Certainly the war against Iran has wiped off virtually every mention of Epstein from the news, thereby accomplishing Trump’s long-standing goal to move “beyond” the Epstein scandal.

But the most chilling, and most likely, reason for Trump ordering the attack on Iran despite the way it has destabilized the world and shot energy prices up after Trump’s victory lap in the State of the Union address February 24 that they were at last coming down, is simply that he felt like it. During his first term Trump was surrounded by generals and others who kept talking him out of his wildest and most reckless plans for military adventurism. Now the guard rails are long gone and Trump has this big shiny new toy he wants to play with – and the whole world is at the mercy of this deranged, megalomaniac madman American voters inexplicably put into the White House not once, but twice.