"Help Has Arrived"
This is the second time Israel has gone to war with Iran since Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear agreement during his first term, returned to office last year. In June 2025, Israeli warplanes rained down bombs across that country for 12 days. Iran responded with missiles and suicide drones. That bout of fighting killed more than 430 civilians in Iran and at least 28 people in Israel before it ended. The U.S. also joined in, launching a series of strikes on the country, and the president boasted that the attacks had "completely and totally obliterated" the Iranian nuclear program.
Last October, Trump included that war on his list when he took credit for ending "eight wars in eight months." After Trump and Netanyahu again went to war with Iran this February, the American president offered new justifications. In addition to vowing to help persecuted Iranians, he said that the regime was building missiles that "could soon reach the American homeland," a claim U.S. intelligence reportedly denied. He also cited a supposedly "imminent" Iranian attack and mentioned the same nuclear program he had previously said was destroyed.
In the United States, few people believe the war is justified. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that more than half of the respondents believed Iran posed at worst a minor threat or no threat at all. Even among pro-MAGA media figures, including several prominent ones like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have railed against the president. "It's hard to say this, but the United States didn't make the decision here," Carlson said. "Benjamin Netanyahu did."
The real reason Trump has shed his former claims to anti-interventionism, though, is history. Since 1776, according to the Military Intervention Project of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, the United States has intervened militarily in foreign countries nearly 400 times. Since September 11, 2001, U.S.-led counterterrorism operations have reached at least 78 countries. As of 2021, the U.S. had spent more than $8 trillion on its Global War on Terror, a series of conflicts that the Cost of War project at Brown University estimates to have killed at least 900,000 people. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's budget has reached $1 trillion and defense contractors continue to pump tens of millions of dollars into lawmakers' pockets each election cycle. With a record like that, what help can an American president really offer Iranians living under a repressive regime?
For my part, each new report of an American or Israeli airstrike hitting a home, a hospital, or a school in Iran brings back another memory from my years living in the West Bank. After a bullet cut Nadim Nuwara's life short in the late spring of 2014, I was sitting in his family's living room when his little brother came in. He was 10, small and gentle-voiced, and wore a backward hat. He held up a large photo of his brother. "I thought this summer was going to be very fun with my brother," he told me. "I thought Nadim and I were going to be able to play together a lot. But he's gone now and this is going to be a very bad summer."
During the first 24 hours of this latest war alone, U.S. Central Command's Brad Cooper announced in a video on X that the scope of the assault on Iran was "nearly double the scale" of the first day of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. On the first day of the war, Benjamin Netanyahu released another video in which he directly addressed Iranians. "Your suffering and sacrifice will not be in vain," he insisted. "The help you have prayed for, that help has arrived." And then the slaughter continued.
Copyright 2026 Patrick Strickland
-- --(Article changed on Mar 29, 2026 at 3:15 PM EDT)
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