The George W. Bush White House and its media partisans sold the Iraq War on a foundation of fabrication and spin. In the run-up to invasion, hawkish voices such as CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman assured audiences that initiating regime change would usher in reform across the Arab world. After hostilities began, Fox News’s Brit Hume crowed that critics had been “completely wrong,” and his fellow commentator Tony Snow spoke of a “relatively bloodless victory”—two pronouncements that soured badly as Iraq descended into years of warfare, with American troops repeatedly placed in harm’s way.
Across the border in Iran, similar expectations prevailed among pro-war media figures who argued the Iranian regime would crumble at the first push. Once hostilities commenced, they largely ignored clear indicators that the plan wasn’t unfolding as hoped. Unlike Iraq, the conflict in Iran did not evolve into a drawn-out insurgency; the United States did not topple the government, instead accepting a ceasefire after four weeks. Yet that ceasefire quickly faltered. By the time this article was written, Washington and Tehran were clashing over the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic gateway for global trade that had been open before the conflict began.
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Prior to the February 28 strike on Iran, a chorus of media figures—with direct connections to President Donald Trump—argued that any war would last only a few days. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen argued that the Iranian regime would fall swiftly because “the Iranian people are the boots on the ground.” Mark Dubowitz, head of the neocon think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Hugh Hewitt Show that Ali Khamenei would not resist, since it would mean the end of his rule. Fox News’s Mark Levin asserted that Iran itself could not mount a serious defense.
Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince ousted in 1979, was a frequent guest on Fox News as a pro-war Iranian voice. While he did have some sympathy within certain Iranian circles, the suburban father-turned-prince made promises he could not fulfill. In a February 12 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Pahlavi urged intervention by Washington, claiming he had recruited an army of 100,000 defectors. No uprising against the regime materialized during the conflict.
John Podhoretz, heir to the neoconservative magazine Commentary, at least conceded that his forecasts had misfired. In the war’s opening hours, he wrote that the U.S. military would leave “the Iranians with little to do to boot the mullahs out.” In a Commentary podcast four months later, he reflected that “there is no person on Earth who is going to say that America didn’t lose the war.”
Other pundits simply refused to acknowledge when events contradicted their theses. Week after week, Fox News’s Jack Keane insisted that the conflict would be wrapped up in two or three more weeks. Much of these arguments boiled down to urging audiences to stay silent and trust the leadership. In mid-March, retired British Army officer Richard Kemp complained in The Telegraph about excessive “doom mongering,” claiming the media were not privy to the brilliance of Trump’s approach.
On CNN, just days before the April ceasefire, former Bush administration official Scott Jennings asserted that “there is no doubt we have defanged this regime.” Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with the neocon Hudson Institute, argued a few days after the ceasefire that the West ignored the “lived experience” of Arabs, who she claimed supported the war. Public polls before and after the conflict suggested Arab publics were increasingly backing Iran and opposing the war. Riboua also argued that the war was largely about weakening China by eliminating a cheap oil source. Three months after the ceasefire, China was snapping up discounted oil from Iran’s rivals.
Soon after the ceasefire, Trump sought to escalate pressure on Iran by blockading its ports, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a projection that Iran would be forced to shut down its oil wells within 13 days, inflicting lasting damage. Trump echoed a similar timeline on Fox News, predicting that the wells would literally explode by the end of April. Those predictions did not come to pass.
Many of the same advocates who cheered on the Iraq invasion — and used many of the same arguments — were also loud in backing Iran hawkishness. Fox News’s Sean Hannity, who in February 2003 anticipated a quick end to the Iraq War, offered nearly identical predictions in February 2026: “It’s not going to be a forever war. It’s going to be overwhelming military might and force, and then it will be up to the people of Iran. If they want a chance at freedom, they will have it, I believe, within the next few weeks.” The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who boasted in 2023 about his lack of remorse over the Iraq War, lamented in March 2026 about “our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.”
There is a revolving door between hawkish punditry and government service. Benjamin Netanyahu, testifying before the U.S. Congress in 2002 as a private citizen and former prime minister, argued that invading Iraq would yield “enormous positive reverberations.” Now returning as Israel’s prime minister, he aided Trump’s Iran-war planning. In 2002, Condoleezza Rice, then the U.S. national security adviser, defended the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, famously telling CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” In July 2026, Rice spoke at the Aspen Security Forum about the new confrontation with Iran, remarking, “When I hear, ‘Well, it wasn’t imminent,’ I wonder, ‘Do you really want to wait until it is?’”
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on us.
