Imperialist Wars Start with Imperialist Lies

Pinocchio Goes to War

The White House, Home of the Whopper, No Matter Who’s in Office

In launching the joint war of the United States and Israel on February 28, Donald Trump stated that its “noble mission” was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime. A vicious group of very hard, terrible people.” He claimed that “Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror,” and that “this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon.” But “Iran refused” to “renounce their nuclear ambitions,” Trump said: “They just wanted to practice evil.” And he told the “people of Iran,” that “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” as the attackers would bring down “this very wicked, radical dictatorship.”

Where previous commanders of U.S. imperialism would proclaim an overarching goal – like Woodrow Wilson falsely claiming that the U.S. entered World War I to wage a “war for democracy,” or Franklin D. Roosevelt piously saying the U.S. was fighting for “four freedoms” in the lead-up up to its entry into World War II – Trump listed many different aims, all based on lies, for his “Operation Epic Fury.” Today, as he suggests that the U.S. is close to winding up operations in “the next two to three weeks,” none of those supposed war aims is even close to being achieved.

Iran an “imminent threat”? On what evidence? President Trump “had a good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike” U.S. assets in the region, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Yet on March 17, Trump’s counterterrorism center head Joe Kent resigned over the war, saying “Iran posed no imminent threat” to the U.S. An imminent Iranian nuclear weapon? On March 18, Trump’s national intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that Iran had not resumed nuclear enrichment since the U.S. bombing last June.¹ Iran as “No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism”? On the contrary, the top state terrorist is the U.S., which has killed over a million people in its Middle Eastern wars since 1990 (and millions more in Vietnam and Korea), with Israel as No. 2, specializing in assassinations and genocide.

As for dictatorship, at a meeting with corporate chiefs after his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this past January 21, Trump crowed that he got a lot of good reviews on the speech, unlike usually when people would say of him that “he’s a horrible dictator-like person.” He continued, “I’m a dictator, but sometimes you need a dictator.” This goes along with his repeated statements, for example at an August 2025 marathon cabinet meeting where every member got up to praise him, that “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the President of the United States.” He told cadets at West Point the same thing.²

Of course, Trump is not the first U.S. leader to use lies to go to war. Almost all imperialist wars start with and are based on lies. That is not accidental, since such wars are really about competition with rival imperialist powers over markets, defeating challengers to imperialist world domination, or conquering and subjugating colonial and semicolonial peoples, all in the interest of the ruling classes. That won’t motivate the working people who are called upon to fight and die in these wars. So the warmongers pitch them instead as wars for some virtuous goal (democracy, human rights) or against some atrocity, real or imagined.

Look at U.S. wars in the Middle East in recent decades.

•    The 1990-91 Gulf War launched by President George Bush I following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was sold to the public with an appearance before Congress of a young woman who claimed to be a nurse in the Kuwait City hospital who described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies from incubators and leaving them on the floor to die. The story was a total fabrication and the woman was not a nurse but the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.

•    The 2001 U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan under George Bush II, which lasted for 20 years, was launched on the pretext that Afghanistan was behind the 11 September 2001 attack on the New York City World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It wasn’t, and the alleged mastermind, Osama bin Laden, was a disaffected member of the ruling elite of Saudi Arabia who had been financed by the U.S. to supply Islamist mujahedin waging a “holy war” against the Soviet-allied Afghan government during 1980-88.

•    The alibi for the U.S. 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was the claim of the Bush II administration of Saddam’s supposed arsenal of chemical and biological “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). This story line, intended to justify “regime change” in Baghdad, was pushed in particular by New York Times journalist Judith Miller. It left out that the U.S. had supplied chemical weapons to Iraq in its 1980-88 war with Iran. After the invasion a search by United Nations arms inspectors turned up no WMDs. It was a fiction to sell the war.³

•    Going back in time, there was the August 1964 “Gulf of Tonkin incident” used by the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson to ramp up U.S. imperialism’s war on Vietnam. It was claimed that a U.S. destroyer had come under attack by North Vietrnamese naval vessels, although none had occurred, no North Vietnamese vessels were even present. The administration knew this, but used deliberately skewed “intelligence” by the National Security Agency to get the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress to escalate its anti-communist war on Vietnam. The vast scale of official lying about the war caused widespread indignation when the Defense Department’s own secret history of U.S. policy towards Vietnam (the “Pentagon Papers”) was leaked and published in 1971.

•    Then there was the supposedly unprovoked Japanese “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that led to the World War II U.S. declaration of war on Japan. Trump recently joked about this in a visit to the White House by Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi. Yet in fact, U.S. war secretary Stimson was informed about the progress of the Japanese fleet, while President Roosevelt predicted almost to the day when an attack would occur, as the two sought to “maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot” (from Stimson’s diary). The attack was provoked by U.S. sanctions on Japan, particularly to deprive it of oil.

•    In the inter-imperialist war before that, the 1915 sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania by a German U-boat became a casus belli (an act or event used to justify a war) for bringing the United States into World War I a couple of years later. The ship was a Royal Navy Reserve Merchant Vessel, carrying thousands of crates of munitions in its hold, and the week before its sinking the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had encouraged shipping from and to the then-neutral U.S. “in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.”
•    And don’t forget “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain,” the newspaper slogan about the U.S. Navy warship that sank in the Havana harbor in February 1898. This became the battle cry for the U.S.’ first imperialist war, to seize the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines and Guam, begun two months later by President William McKinley, Donald Trump’s favorite president. While the sensationalist “yellow press” blamed Spain, several Navy investigations held that it was due to a fire in the coal room.

Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf, describes the technique of the Big Lie, which the broad masses are more likely to believe as they cannot imagine themselves fabricating “colossal untruths,” whereas they often tell small lies. Hitler falsely ascribed this technique to “the Jews,” but in fact it exactly describes the Nazi propaganda that blamed Germany’s loss in World War I on Jews and leftists. Donald Trump, according to his first wife, Ivana Trump, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Trump’s distinctive feature is that he tells lies – big, medium and small – about everything all the time.⁴ Kind of a sinister, big-time Pinocchio.

In June 2022, Trump sued CNN for defamation over the network’s references to his use of the Big Lie in alleging, against all evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The suit was dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge in 2023, whose ruling was upheld in November 2025 by a three-judge U.S. District Court of Appeals panel (two of them Trump appointees). They found Trump’s suit “meritless,” since “by using ‘Big Lie’ to describe Trump, CNN was not publishing a false statement of fact.” And on March 17, Trump’s appeal for a hearing by the full court was turned down because not one of the judges (including five Trump appointees) would agree to hear it.

Trump’s non-stop lies are, in fact, a method. At a 2021 rally in Florida he said, “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you” (CNN, 5 July 2021). Of course he attributed this method to his opponents, just as Hitler pretended that Jews originated the Big Lie. Some have argued that Trump’s endless false statements are often “bullshitting,” making claims not knowing if they are true, which he bragged about over Canadian tariffs, for example. Often it is calculating that with the power of the presidency, he can make his claims true, for example by pardoning the 6 January 2021 rioters and seizing ballots from the 2020 election in Georgia.

For Trump, “facts” are whatever he decides they are. When he demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” by the Iranian regime on his social media site, Truth Social, press secretary Leavitt explained that when Trump “as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, determines” it is no longer a threat, then “Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender. Whether they say it themselves or not. Frankly, they don’t have a lot of people to say that for them because the United States and the state of Israel have completely wiped out more than 50 leaders” of Iran, “including the Supreme Leader himself.”

The prevarications of this Pinocchio in power are purposeful. Again, he is not alone in this. Trump refers to the war on Iran as “major combat operations” in order to hinder efforts to invoke the 1973 War Powers Act, which reiterated that, under the U.S. Constitution, it is Congress, not the president, who can declare war. But since that act was passed every president, Democrat or Republican, has sought to get around it, using one subterfuge or another. Decades before that, in 1950, Democratic president Harry Truman termed the Korean War a “police action” under the authority of the United Nations, in order to avoid asking for a Congressional declaration of war.

At bottom Trump and his gang don’t care about justifications for the war on Iran. After a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka, killing over 100 sailors, he bragged at a March 9 Republican Congressional conference about destroying the Iranian navy. Trump said he asked “our people” why they didn’t capture the ships instead. “They said, ‘It’s more fun to sink them.’” At a March 2 press conference, Trump’s macho-posturing “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth proclaimed, “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.” This is the “maximum lethality” this Christian nationalist war criminal announced last September.

When the U.S. president claims that the Iranian missiles have been destroyed, that “regime change” has already happened, that Iranian leaders are “begging” for a ceasefire, that he no longer cares about Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium because they are buried under so much rubble – none of it true – it’s because he wants to get out before getting bogged down in another “forever war.” But in an unhinged April 1 prime time speech, Trump vowed that if he couldn’t get a deal to reopen the Hormuz Strait, on his way out he would “hit each and every one of their electrical generating plants” and bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

 This is the same language that the mad bomber General Curtis LeMay used about Vietnam, when he said (in his 1965 autobiography) that Washington should tell North Vietnam to stop its aggression (!) or the U.S. would “bomb them into the Stone Age.” The Pentagon unleashed 7.6 million tons (more than triple the tonnage of munitions used by the U.S. military in all of World War II),⁵ as well as chemical weapons such as Agent Orange and napalm, to poison and incinerate the Vietnamese, but it didn’t stave off defeat at the hands of the heroic Communist fighters.

U.S. president Donald J. Trump may assert that the facts are as he determines them to be, but U.S. leaders would do well to remember the maxim of Trump’s first defense secretary, James Mattis, who said, “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” And as Iranian authorities put it in response to Trump’s five-point “peace plan”:  the United States and Israel started the war, but “Iran will end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met” (Press TV, 25 March). ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Return to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page