By David Stockman - March 5, 2026

The sheer barking hypocrisy of the Donald’s, yes, unprovoked and senseless attack on Iran is surely one for the record books.

After years of noisy campaigning against the Forever Wars and 12 months back in the Oval Office spent in hot pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, the Donald has not only started an utterly unnecessary new and very hot war, but did it essentially by gratuitously putting America’s vast War Machine out on a “loaner” to Bibi Netanyahu.

And, no, we did not don our tinfoil hat this AM. Little Marco Rubio removed all doubt when he said in absolutely explicit terms recently that American troops in the Middle East were in “imminent danger” because the Donald had given the old green-lit wink and nod to Bibi to kill the Ayatollah and decapitate Iran’s leadership. So Washington had to preemptively protect US forces caught in harms’ way by joining Bibi’s strike.

If that doesn’t constitute renting out the US War Machine to the genocidal madman who is allegedly America’s “ally”, we don’t know what else to call it. After all, the Donald only needed to have told Bibi “f*ck, no!” and the current horror show in the Middle East would never have started.

In any event, the fact remains: There is not a single plausible reason based on America’s Homeland Security for attacking Iran. So what we have is an utter betrayal of everything Trump has ever said about war & peace and the conduct of American policy abroad.

Once again, sadly, Bibi Netanyahu has bamboozled the man’s smallish brain, negligible knowledge of the region’s history and his gigantic ego into the goddamned dumbest foreign military intervention by Washington during the last half-century. And that includes a lot of stupid-ass competition.

Trump on the campaign trail: “We are finally putting America First. Our policy of war regime change and nation-building is being replaced by the pursuit of American interests… It is the job of our military to protect our security, not to be the policemen of the world.“

Now, if this were just a standard case of the kind of political hypocrisy that is par for the course in Washington, Trump’s Iran attack might be dismissed as more of the same old, same old. You might even say the sheeples of America should not by surprised that the ravenous wolf they knowingly re-elected wasn’t a vegetarian after all.

Indeed, you might well conclude, as we have, that Donald Trump has now proven himself to be the most deceitful fraud in US political history. But even that wouldn’t be the whole story or even the most important part of it.

Unfortunately, there are far more insidious forces at work in this horrific turn of events than just standard political hypocrisy and campaign lies. What we really have here is a vast war machine, a false neocon foreign policy narrative and an infrastructure of Empire so deeply embedded in the very warp and woof of America’s process of governance that the outcomes of elections have become essentially immaterial. Or as our friend Tom Woods astutely observed, elections don’t matter much because we always elect John McCain.

And it seems to be getting worse with time. In fact, here is the box score for the last 10 US military interventions and the number of them embraced by each of America’s four presidents during the 21st century to date . . .

[SNIP]