In 1980, Iraq produced The Long Days, a six-hour dramatisation of the young Saddam’s participation in the failed 1959 attempt to assassinate Iraqi prime minister Abdul-Karim Qasim. Terence Young, the British filmmaker famous for directing the James Bond films Dr No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball, was commissioned to edit it.

Then there was Clash of Loyalties (1983), a lavish historical epic set against the 1920 revolt against British rule.

One actor described it as “Saddam's version of Lawrence of Arabia”.

There was another obvious precedent: Lion of the Desert (1981), an epic commissioned by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. That film had starred legendary hellraiser Oliver Reed. Saddam's production also hired him to play Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Leachman, a flamboyant British intelligence officer fighting against the Iraqi revolt.

Incidentally, stories from the production are vintage Oliver Reed: producer Lateif Jorephani recalled him urinating into a wine bottle and instructing a waiter to take it to the next table “with my compliments”. A co-star first met a cackling Reed as he was being dangled by his ankles from a fifth-floor window by his own minder.

Clash of Loyalties was also intended to connect Saddam’s Ba’ath Party to the Iraqi revolutionaries who had fought British rule six decades earlier. Saddam loved it and hoped for half a dozen historical epics from the same production team. But the Iran-Iraq War quickly intruded. Jorephani recalled that orders came “from upstairs” to “give the impression that life goes on as normal”.

Whatever audience the film found inside Iraq, however, its hoped-for international breakthrough never materialised. It was ultimately seen by just a few hundred people overseas, and Jorephani ended up storing the original film canisters in his garage in Surrey.

The Oliver Reed stories may have seemed like fun. The media system my friend in Iraq, Malik M. Obaid, grew up with was not.

Malik remembers a television segment called Lest We Forget, consisting of footage from the Iran-Iraq War: “soldiers running and soldiers using projectiles”. He and the other children tried to skip it, but doing so meant missing part of the precious 30 minutes of cartoons that followed, including Tom and Jerry. The television set was so prone to overheating that he had rigged up a makeshift hammock to keep air circulating around it.

The Ba'athists' use of television for intimidation long predated Saddam's presidency. After Qasim was overthrown in 1963, television repeatedly showed a lengthy film of his bullet-riddled corpse. His body was propped on a chair, its wounds shown in close-up, while a soldier manhandled it for the camera. Kanan Makiya later described the message in his book Republic of Fear: “he is dead, you had better believe it, we can do the same to you.”

During the 1991 uprising that followed the Gulf War, Malik says Republican Guard vehicles drove through the streets instructing people to leave their homes. The message was reassuring: come outside and you will be safe. Stay inside, however, and the forces would enter the houses.

“My father told my elder brothers: ‘Do not go out, because he cheats,’” Malik recalls. His brothers worried that security forces would come into the house and kill them. But their father insisted: “No, they are cheating. Stay here, you will be safe.”

“They followed my father’s instructions,” Malik told me, “and they are alive till now.”

Malik says his father later told him that some of those who went outside were not just detained but buried alive.

Malik himself calls Saddam’s reassurances “propaganda”. Here, trusting a message from the state could have immediate consequences.

At secondary school, Malik says, membership of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party was effectively compulsory. When the school manager came looking for pupils who hadn’t paid the monthly fee, Malik would flee the classroom and hide in the grass behind the school.

During the summer holidays, he avoided weapons training by hiding on his family’s farm outside the city.

Saddam’s control over Iraq’s media did not survive him. In 2003, the change was dramatic. Within months, Iraq had 15 to 17 Iraqi-owned television stations and around 200 Iraqi-owned newspapers, of varying quality.

But for audiences in Britain, the images that followed were hardly more cheerful: invasion, insurgency, sectarian violence and ISIS. I had absorbed that picture of Iraq too.

Then, this summer, I went there.

I travelled through Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala during the Arbaeen religious festival and found images of Iraq being produced on an extraordinary scale.

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There were television crews, photographers, social-media producers and media centres. Religious institutions themselves were producing enormous quantities of video and photographic material in multiple formats and languages.

At one media centre I found a sheet of paper taped rather unceremoniously to a wall.

On it was a QR code.

Here was a media institution literally saying: take our pictures. Take our video. Use them. Pass them on.

The code opened an enormous online archive, running to several terabytes. There were films, documentaries, talk shows and quiz shows. It even contained something resembling an Iraqi University Challenge: teams of students answering questions about the Quran.

The scale was impressive; the intended audience rather harder to discern. Quite what a visiting British academic, a Russian reporter or a group of social-media influencers were supposed to do with this material wasn’t entirely clear. But there it was, freely available to all of us.

The old media system exploited the scarcity of alternatives to put war footage in front of a child waiting for his cartoons.

The new one existed in almost the opposite conditions: an abundance of media circulating through countless channels.

At the Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas Complex, we were shown an enormous, bound physical book documenting crimes committed during Saddam Hussein’s rule.

One of the social-media influencers travelling with us, Mourteja, wasn’t convinced. His argument was simple: a giant book doesn’t reach people. Why not turn this history into television capable of reaching millions?

There was something faintly comical about a TikTok influencer explaining audience reach to a major religious institution.

Elsewhere, at the Al-Abbas Holy Shrine Media Department, a television drama about crimes committed during Saddam’s period was being made. We could even hear the actors screaming through the walls.

Much of this image-making wasn’t institutional at all. Pilgrims were constantly photographing the shrines, filming the walk and posting what they encountered.

And the hospitality wasn’t simply an image being produced for the cameras. It kept happening to me.

Along the pilgrimage routes, thousands of mawkibs provide pilgrims with free coffee. Raisin drinks. Cucumber juice. Meals.

At one point I asked Saif, one of the pilgrims, what would seem an obvious question for a political scientist:

“Twenty million people coming here must be good for the Iraqi economy?”

“Er, yes. Maybe,” but Saif looked confused. “I mean, it would be… except they give everything away.”

It occurred to me later that the media centre had done much the same thing: it had given away its images.

During the making of Clash of Loyalties, the line between images and reality became almost absurdly blurred. Actors were called away to fight in the Iran-Iraq War; the plane carrying Oliver Reed landed without lights to reduce the risk of missile attack; and when the filmmakers blew up a fake military train near the Iranian border, Iranian media reportedly announced that its forces had destroyed a real one.

Four decades later, the Iraq I encountered was awash with people making images of their own.

The Ba’athists repeatedly paraded the corpse of a murdered prime minister on television. The Iraqi media I encountered was noisy, generous and much less controlled. For a country so often imagined from abroad as permanently doomed to catastrophe, that is a story worth telling too.

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But I don’t like crowds. I get lost and they stress me out.

The road to Karbala fills with people desperate to give away food, water, even money - “and they’ll sell their cars just to give you more.”

But I don’t want poor people throwing the last of what they have at me.

At the centre of it all are shrines built around men who died nearly fourteen hundred years ago.

But I’m not religious and know nothing about Islamic history.

Those were my first thoughts when I was invited to Iraq.

Then, as my plane took off, a friend texted: the US and Saudi Arabia were carrying out deadly missile strikes in Iraq.

Just as well I’d had less than 24 hours to plan the trip.

The reason for my visit was to report on Arbaeen, a Muslim pilgrimage. It was important for my academic work.

But very quickly, it stopped feeling like work.

At Baghdad airport, the first thing I saw was a fridge full of cold water.

“For the Arbaeen pilgrimage”, somebody had written in marker pen.

Then it kept happening. Coffee. Raisin drinks. Cucumber juice (I’ll post the recipe below, it’s great).

Later, travelling with our group, I was repeatedly fed and housed for free along the pilgrim trail. And whatever I had imagined, this didn't look like grim self-sacrifice. It was sociable. Joyful.

At one point I asked Saif, one of the pilgrims, what would seem an obvious question for a political scientist:

“Twenty million people coming here must be good for the Iraqi economy?”

“Er, yes. Maybe,” but Saif looked confused. “I mean, it would be… except they give everything away.”

We complain a lot about festivals becoming too commercialised. If one ever warranted a bit more commercialisation, it was Arbaeen.

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Christopher Hitchens famously asserted in his book God is Not Great that “religion poisons everything”. But there was something genuinely strange and pleasant about encountering an enormous gathering in which so much activity wasn’t organised around extracting money from the people attending it.

I had spent my life thinking about religion in terms of what it makes people believe.

I started to think more about what it makes people do.

And at Arbaeen, one of the things it makes millions of people do is be remarkably nice to strangers.

Similarly, as a media studies academic, I have come to bracket almost everything in public life as entertainment. Sport is entertainment. The news typically functions as entertainment. War coverage is often, and rightly, called militainment. What are poetry and novels if not entertainment?

Arbaeen has media teams, too - very sophisticated ones. But the event itself didn’t seem to exist for an audience.

The people weren’t spectators. They were doing it.

And millions would still be doing it even if nobody was filming. They were doing it 20 years - over one thousand years - before smartphones. They did do it under the worst conditions - our translator Malik remembered walking the route in 2003 and 2004 despite rumours that the path had been mined and water stations poisoned by Saddamists.

They walked anyway.

The shrines themselves are something else. Inside, light fractures across countless pieces of mirrored glass. Chandeliers, tiles, patterns and calligraphy cover almost everything inside. The buildings are more like huge temples than the little watery make-a-wish fountains I thought of as shrines.

[Above] The Station of Imam al-Mahdi, the saviour Imam who, in Shia belief, will appear with Jesus Christ at the end of time to establish justice on Earth.

I don’t know if it was the tiredness, but at the Al-Abbas Shrine I was reminded of a little crystal I owned as a child. It was probably worth about fifty pence.

But children don’t understand treasure in terms of market value. A stone. A shell. Some tiny object you’ve decided is precious.

Imagine taking billions of tiny little loved things and assembling them in one place as an expression of devotion.

The shrines felt as though somebody had tried to construct heaven.

Somewhere in this train of thought, I remembered The Mysterious Cities of Gold.

If you were a kid in the 1980s, you may remember it too.

That story took place in the Americas.

But it is Iraq that is the cradle of civilisation. Much of ancient Mesopotamia lay within modern Iraq. Sumer. Babylon. Assyria. Some of humanity's earliest written laws and transformative inventions - including the wheel.

And suddenly the Iraq in my own head - Saddam, sanctions, ISIS - looked strangely small.

None of it was imaginary.

But it was forty years sitting on top of six thousand.

In Karbala I watched six men carrying a coffin towards the shrine of Imam Hussain.

It was marked Basra.

Basra is 500km away.

I don’t know how much of that journey the men themselves had made on foot. But the destination mattered. And many do indeed walk the whole thing.

Hussain was defeated and killed at Karbala nearly fourteen centuries ago.

The rulers who killed him are long gone. Saddam, who later tried to suppress his commemoration, is gone too.

The name of Imam Hussain - not Saddam Hussein - fills Karbala.

Ideas about injustice, loyalty, sacrifice and resistance to oppression aren’t exhibits behind glass.

People use them to understand their own lives.

Twenty million pilgrims had sounded less like a spiritual experience than an unusually elaborate way of losing my passport.

And, yes, it was overwhelming.

But it wasn’t Leeds at kicking-out time.

In one of the largest concentrations of human beings on Earth, I felt safe.

At one of the holy sites, some of the Muslims travelling with us explained that this was a place where I could pray for something I wanted.

I didn’t have some great objective I wanted God to deliver.

They suggested something simpler.

“Ask God to give you peace of heart and a purpose that will elevate your soul.”

So I did.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by it.

But it seemed like a good thing to pray for.

And then I started dreaming - much more vividly than usual.

Some of the dreams were extraordinarily clear and even contained messages, as though from somewhere else.

I did not go to Arbaeen and undergo a religious conversion.

And I’m wary of retrofitting mystical explanations onto what happens to the brain when you fly somewhere unfamiliar, sleep irregularly and spend a week immersed in something like this.

But the sequence is strange enough that I don’t particularly want to explain it away either.

Back in England, my mind is a little quieter. I’ve scrolled less. I’ve taken a few weeks away from pubs. And next Sunday morning, I might even wander through the local field through the doors of the local church.

Alhamdulilah. 🩷

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PS: I promised the cucumber juice recipe…

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That was my friend’s advice as I set off last week on a very last-minute trip to Iraq. He actually screeched his bike to a halt to deliver the warning.

Everyone, it seemed, had a mental picture of Iraq.

Mine was certainly no better.

For decades, Iraq had been a byword for dictatorship, invasion and terrorism. Saddam Hussein from 1979. Sanctions and the Gulf War from 1990. Shock and Awe in 2003. ISIS overrunning Mosul in 2014 before finally being pushed out in 2017.

Nor were all these anxieties imaginary. As my plane took off, the United States and Saudi Arabia killed 20 people in strikes on Iranian-sponsored paramilitary groups in Iraq, just east of my new summer holiday destination. President Trump announced he would “beat the f*cking sh*t” out of that sponsor.

Even after twenty years researching propaganda and foreign policy, this was still the Iraq in my head.

But perhaps 2017 was when many of us stopped watching.

One of our interpreters, Malik, had been a child under Saddam.

He remembered years of deprivation. His family survived largely on dates and, sometimes, as little as one egg per month.

Their old television overheated so badly that they fashioned a kind of hammock for it to provide a breeze.

Malik waited desperately for the twenty minutes of cartoons broadcast each day.

But first came Lest We Forget. It was a minute-long propaganda programme about the Iran-Iraq War.

The Iraq Malik described was recognisable as the country in my head.

The one outside my window was not.

The reason for my visit was Arbaeen, a Shia Muslim pilgrimage to Karbala, south of Baghdad.

More than twenty million pilgrims attend. Around five million come from outside Iraq.

By some estimates, that makes it the largest annual public gathering in the world.

I had never heard of it.

Had you?

My hosts covered the trip. The assignment, according to our group leader Amjed, was simply to “share your genuine experience with your audience”.

Arbaeen marks forty days after the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was killed at Karbala in 680 after refusing allegiance to the Umayyad ruler Yazid I. For Shia Muslims, Imam Hussein became the supreme symbol of resistance to injustice.

Saddam restricted the pilgrimage, allegedly punishing Shia practices with death, sometimes by acid, sometimes by AK-47.

After Saddam fell, the pilgrimage resurged spectacularly. Malik remembers rumours of mines and poisoned drinks along the route; the dangers were certainly real, with Shia pilgrims and holy sites becoming targets of deadly attacks.

But there is a historical irony here: Imam Hussein lost at Karbala, yet fourteen centuries later the defeated man’s name mobilises millions, while the Umayyad rulers who killed him are long gone.

Saddam’s regime, which later tried to suppress his commemoration, is gone too. A gathering of millions, organised around religious loyalties and ideas of resistance to injustice rather than loyalty to the state, was an obvious threat to his seemingly iron grip.

None of this history quite prepared me for the shrines themselves. They are staggeringly beautiful: vast complexes of gold, mirrored glass, chandeliers, calligraphy and crowds, at once places of worship, historical memory and enormous public institutions.

Yet almost as striking was that the country I experienced looked so unlike the one I had expected.

The airport functioned. Roads were busy (“there are traffic laws not really,” Amjed quipped). The famous Green Zone, once the heavily fortified symbol of post-invasion Iraq, wasn’t something anybody even talked about.

I was also struck by how little I heard the Sunni-Shia division invoked in ordinary conversation. Amjed told me, “If you asked someone on the street whether they’re Sunni or Shia, you would actually create a problem.” It would be seen as genuinely rude, as though you were trying to reopen a division many Iraqis would rather leave behind.

That hardly means Iraq has transcended sectarian politics – its political system remains deeply shaped by sectarian and ethnic power-sharing – but it was strikingly different from the country whose sectarianism once dominated the news.

Throughout the pilgrimage, Iraqis seemed determined to feed, water, house and help us.

Thousands of mawkibs line the roads: temporary hospitality stations providing food, coffee, juice, water and other services without charge.

But there was something I hadn’t understood.

From a British perspective, accepting could almost feel like doing the giver a favour.

Service to pilgrims was itself an honour.

Iraq itself still has profound problems. It ranks 162nd of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index and 136th of 182 in Transparency International’s latest corruption index.

A hosted trip hardly qualified me to make sweeping judgements about women’s lives in Iraq. They were everywhere among the pilgrims. In a lift in Karbala, two women in black abayas suddenly started speaking in unmistakable Luton accents. Many religious spaces, however, were segregated by sex. More troublingly, recent changes to Iraq’s family law have been fiercely opposed by Iraqi women’s groups, particularly over marriage, divorce and child marriage.

Nor did the disappearance of the US military from everyday view mean that its power had dissipated. American troops remained on bases, but I never saw one. American economic power was, of course, even harder to photograph: Iraq’s oil revenues still flow through an account held by the Central Bank of Iraq at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an extraordinary legacy of the post-2003 order that gives Washington considerable leverage over the national purse strings.

In 2020, when Baghdad sought the withdrawal of US troops, Washington threatened to restrict access to its funds. More recently, Washington has restricted Iraqi banks’ access to dollars because of concerns about money reaching Iran.

But the biggest surprise of the trip lay elsewhere.

Before arriving, I had imagined spending most of my time touring shrines.

We did.

But after the visits, we kept being taken somewhere else.

Behind the scenes - and into the shrines’ media centres.

Giant screens. Live streams. Social-media teams. Servers and storage infrastructure.

In Najaf, religious leaders produced an old-fashioned book half my height, containing copies of Saddam-era documents recording his crimes.

Meanwhile, another centre in Baghdad was producing a television drama about the same history. We could hear the actors screaming through the walls.

For an event attracting millions of people from 40 countries, Arbaeen is remarkably obscure in the West.

It gradually became obvious why we had been invited.

Most of my group were American influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Mourteja passed one million followers on Instagram while we were there. We celebrated with cake.

I was the odd academic out, trailing by just shy of a million followers.

The media centres produce content in multiple languages. Much of it is made freely available for others to reuse and share.

The point isn’t simply to document Arbaeen.

It’s to make Arbaeen travel.

Countries project themselves in different ways. Britain has the BBC. America has Hollywood.

Iraq has something stranger: a form of soft power no institution quite created or controls.

Arbaeen wasn’t manufactured. It exists because millions of people have passionately believed in it for over a thousand years.

So, yes, Arbaeen’s resurgence also has a geopolitical dimension. Since Saddam's fall, Shia parties have become central to Iraqi politics, while neighbouring Iran has acquired influence unimaginable under the Ba'athist dictatorship.

During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, the US came to back Saddam against Iran. Now, with Saddam long dead, Iran has won the peace. And it feels faintly threatening to elements in the West - US military commanders apparently dubbed the vast dark-clothed procession into Karbala, seen from above, “the black snake”.

Iraq’s population has nearly doubled since the 2003 invasion. Its median age is barely 21.

And suddenly something obvious occurred to me.

The Iraq I had been carrying around in my head wasn’t merely politically outdated.

It was populated by the wrong generation.

I travelled to Iraq expecting to learn about Islam.

But the people preserving a seventh-century story are also serious practitioners of twenty-first-century communication.

I came home wondering whether the biggest gap was not between Iraq and Britain, but between the Iraq that exists today and the one that still occupies our imagination.

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That comparison now looks less straightforward.

The true war-attributable death toll is probably already above 100,000, and the eventual figure remains unknown. Yet for all the extraordinary displacement, hunger and collapse of infrastructure, new mortality evidence points to a substantially smaller demographic scale than Cambodia.

So what has gone on here?

In short, I over-estimated the causal relationship between extraordinary physical destruction and deaths.

As I argued in January 2025, there was a good case “that no place has ever been deliberately as intensely pulverised as contemporary Gaza”. Things then somehow deteriorated eve further - by October 2025, UN satellite analysis found that approximately 81 per cent of all structures in Gaza had sustained damage. UNOSAT classified 123,464 structures as destroyed, a figure equivalent to roughly half of Gaza’s total building stock.

[Above] UN satellite analysis of structural damage in Gaza. By October 2025, UNOSAT classified 123,464 structures as destroyed.

But stronger evidence on total mortality now comes from the Gaza Mortality Survey, published in The Lancet Global Health in spring 2026. Unlike earlier projections, it is based on a population-representative household survey conducted inside Gaza.

The survey estimated approximately 75,200 violent deaths during the first 15 months of the war, together with about 8,540 excess non-violent deaths. That produced an estimated total of 83,740 war-attributable deaths by 5 January 2025. Deaths have continued to mount since then - and longer-term indirect mortality remains especially uncertain - but the subsequent periods of intense fighting have been less sustained, interrupted by periods of ceasefire.

A 2024 letter to The Lancet had famously suggested that as many as 186,000 deaths might ultimately be attributable to the conflict, noting that indirect deaths in previous conflicts had sometimes been several times higher than direct deaths. But during the period covered by the Gaza Mortality Survey, the estimated 8,540 excess non-violent deaths were only a fraction of the 75,200 violent deaths - not a multiple.

So, why have there been fewer indirect deaths than feared?

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Well, in part, charities can function under astonishingly primitive conditions. Even now, in late July 2026, aid organisations were trucking drinking water to about 75% of Gaza’s population and humanitarian kitchens were producing roughly 704,000 meals a day.

Demography may also matter. Imagine destroying the healthcare system of a British population. You would immediately strand enormous numbers of people in their seventies, eighties and nineties dependent on cardiovascular drugs, cancer treatment, dialysis, and so on. But the median age of Gazans is around 19 which - despite being horrific now in its own right - makes its demographic vulnerability very different from that of an ageing Western population.

Important to note, Gaza’s own figures were conservative. The survey estimated roughly 25,000–30,000 more violent deaths than the Health Ministry had recorded for the same period. Yes, the Hamas-run Health Ministry under-counted. Years of insinuations that its headline death toll was inflated have aged particularly badly.

This messy statistical picture also complicates my thinking about the term genocide. Nothing here suggests that it is inaccurate in the case of Gaza: genocide turns on specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, rather than a particular body count. But the enormous variation in the demographic scale of events described as genocides can make the term difficult to get a handle on. And international law does require the intended destruction to concern a “substantial part” of the group. There is no numerical threshold at which killing 5% of a population is genocide while killing 4% is merely a particularly unpleasant Tuesday. But it is understandable that, alongside intent, people intuitively factor scale into their understanding of the term. The legal, demographic and historical categories don't map neatly onto one another, which helps explain some of the genuine disagreement over terminology.

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The historical episode that began on 7 October has not acquired a clean endpoint. Gaza remains politically unresolved and people continue to die, while Israeli military action and the conflicts surrounding it have extended into Lebanon, the West Bank and Iran. Those deaths cannot simply be added to Gaza’s and called a single genocide. But neither, if we are trying to understand the historical scale of the violence unleashed since October 2023, can they simply be ignored. We are still living through the event we are trying to classify.

Horrifying images encourage us to fill gaps in our knowledge with horrifying assumptions. I did some of that with Gaza. The destruction was every bit as extraordinary as it appeared, but so far its demographic consequences have been substantially lower than I expected.

For now, the Gaza genocide has not reached the demographic scale of Cambodia or Rwanda to which its destruction invited comparison. But it has developed its own chronic and terrible character.

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[Above] My January 2025 article assessing the devastation in the context of other genocides.

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Carl von Clausewitz observed:

“War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”

Yet for more than four years, many of the biggest names commenting on the Russia–Ukraine war have offered one confident forecast after another. And no one seems to remember

[Above] Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831): war, he argued, is "the realm of uncertainty."

NATO Senior Mentor for Logistics Ben Hodges, a constant presence across major British outlets, predicted that Russia would be pushed back to its pre-invasion lines by the end of 2022. He later predicted the war would end with Ukrainian victory by summer 2023, including the liberation of Crimea. None of those forecasts came to pass. Even now, Hodges argues that Russia is "in trouble", that momentum has shifted decisively towards Ukraine, and that sustained pressure will make Crimea untenable.

Another of the UK’s most ubiquitous commentators, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon argued in September 2023 that Ukraine had “a maximum of twelve months, probably less, to vanquish Russia.”

Twelve months came and went.

By September 2025 he was instead arguing that Putin’s remaining strategy was simply to “hang on.” This week, he says that Putin is “barely hanging on”. The rhetoric has changed from imminent Ukrainian victory to imminent Russian exhaustion. The deadlines, however, continue to recede.

But this is not simply a story about rabid war hawks.

Last year, Professor Scott Lucas - whose interviews on The Times podcast attract audiences in the tens of thousands every show - suggested Russia’s economy might have only six to twelve months before economic pressure fundamentally constrained the Kremlin’s ability to continue the war. Scott was an important mentor to me, and one of the best-informed and respected analysts on a range of conflicts. But his year-long deadline, too, is up in August and he is already warning we must prepare for the war to continue “into next winter”.

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And nor is this simply an issue just for those sympathetic to Kyiv. On 27 February 2022 the senior Pentagon adviser Colonel Douglas Macgregor suggested Ukraine would surrender within twenty-four hours. The following day he predicted the war would probably be over within another ten days. Weeks later he declared, “The war is really over for the Ukrainians.” Four years later, it continues.

Scott Ritter, former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector whose interviews have reached enormous alternative-media audiences, was equally sure. Shortly before Russia’s invasion, he predicted that the Ukrainian military would be “annihilated in short order”. When the invasion began, he declared: “This will be over in a week.”

He then kept resetting the deadline. In an October 2022 podcast, he said:

“This isn’t going to take another year-and-a-half. This is going to take at most several months.”

This is not merely my impression. A couple of years ago a major CSIS report by Eliot Cohen and Phillips O’Brien even described the conflict as “A Study in Analytic Failure,” arguing that the problem was not merely that experts were wrong, but that they expressed their judgments with remarkable certainty.

The pattern continues. Just today, the BBC led with an interview with the chief executive of BAE Systems, Charles Woodburn, warning that Britain has been "too complacent" about the threat of war and arguing for higher defence spending. The report is illustrated with stylised fighter jets sweeping across the Westminster skyline, as though Britain itself were already under aerial threat. It is striking that the BBC can consider the head of Europe's largest arms manufacturer, a company whose commercial interests plainly stand to benefit from that assessment, to be a legitimate assessor of risk.

Of course, the greatest burden of getting it right should fall on those advocating escalation rather than negotiation. When commentators dismiss the risk of their actions provoking nuclear war, they should take ownership of it. And are they really so sure? In March, Polymarket put the chances of a nuclear detonation by the end of 2026 at 24%.

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There is nothing wrong with making informed guesses about the future. The problem arises when forecasts presented with great confidence repeatedly fail, yet continue to supply the rationale for policies whose consequences are measured in millions of lives.

Every serious military historian knows that major wars generate surprise, friction, and unintended consequences. As we speak, look at how unstable Kyiv’s attempts are to forcibly recruit new conscripts off the streets - the Ukrainian army could collapse. Yet modern media compounds the already very human need to find optimism in the crystal ball.

The deadlines drift by.

The bodies pile up.

To be clear, I do think there was a case for helping Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion during those desperate opening weeks. Though, whether the conflict could have been avoided beforehand, including through simple diplomacy around NATO enlargement, remains a legitimate subject of debate.

But there is a profound difference between supporting defensive resistance and perpetually forecasting imminent victory.

Foreign policy should not be treated like football punditry - but it is. When influential analysts repeatedly assure the public that victory is just around the corner, they shape expectations, influence governments and narrow the political space for compromise.

Ukraine may conceivably achieve something recognisable as victory - totally dependent on Western weapons and technology. Perhaps Russia can be knocked back and, for some reason, not resort to bigger and bigger weapons or a widening of the war. Who knows, perhaps it is possible simply to keep hitting a bear until it becomes compliant. Even in that case, our victory would be built on more than a million casualties, several hundred thousand deaths, devastated cities, millions displaced and a permanently divided Europe. Ukraine will inherit a legacy of ashes; Russia will never forgive its former partners. Even an unlikely victory would only place us on the first rung of a rotted ladder.

That is precisely why confident prophets should have been in shortest supply.

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Every so often I read an article on defence that makes me think: this is about as sophisticated as these guys get.

David Blair’s latest Telegraph piece advising that an Andy Burnham government restore Britain’s independent air-launched nuclear capability is one of those articles.

Blair doesn’t simply parrot the usual military advice: buy a battery-powered radio, increase defence spending by another few per cent, and somehow make Britain safe.

Instead, he identifies a strategic dilemma and attempts to solve it.

And yet it still rests on assumptions that remain frankly unhinged.

Blair begins from a premise that many people would accept: if Russia were ever to use a tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces, European nations would be in a real bind. The article argues Britain currently has only two responses: launch nukes from its Trident submarines, or do nothing.

The problem, Blair argues, is that launching a Trident missile could look identical to the opening move of a full-scale strategic nuclear attack. Russia would have no immediate way of knowing whether the missile carried one warhead or twelve.

His solution is for Britain to resurrect its independent air-launched nuclear capability. Unlike Trident, aircraft carrying nuclear cruise missiles would supposedly provide “graduated signalling”: a limited response that Russia could recognise as limited.

In other words, we’d have a more plausible deterrent than “all or nothing”.

Well, perhaps.

But put yourself in the Kremlin.

British aircraft carrying nuclear weapons are heading towards Russia.

How exactly do you know they’re ‘only’ carrying one missile? That they won’t be followed by fifty? That they’re not suppressing air defences ahead of a much larger attack, perhaps with US support?

The article assumes aircraft somehow eliminate ambiguity. They don’t. They merely replace one ambiguity with another.

How much confidence would you place in Vladimir Putin correctly interpreting your carefully calibrated signal? Or Donald Trump? Or some Russian radar officer working through the middle of the night with only minutes to assess what is happening?

David Blair's argument rests on the idea that aircraft are inherently more flexible than submarine-launched ballistic missiles. They can be launched in small numbers, recalled, tracked in flight and are generally associated with limited nuclear options rather than civilisation-ending attacks. Whether that distinction would actually matter during a nuclear crisis is another question.

Blair also argues that if Britain fires a Trident missile, it risks revealing the location of its submarine, weakening its second-strike capacity. But this just creates another puzzle - if your submarine exists to guarantee retaliation after Britain has been devastated, why are you using it before Britain has suffered such an attack?

Still, let’s say Blair’s proposal is correct - that an air-launched capability would at least marginally improve Britain’s options in a war with Russia.

Unfortunately, another wee problem remains.

It doesn’t actually exist.

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The UK abandoned its sovereign air-launched nuclear capability decades ago. Rebuilding it would require designing or adapting a warhead, integrating it onto aircraft, certification, testing, manufacturing capacity, new infrastructure, pilot training, operational doctrine and political approval.

The Telegraph’s proposed solution would almost certainly take many years to become operational. By then, the crisis it is intended to address may already have been resolved - or have escalated beyond the point where this capability could make any difference.

Britain’s purchase of American-built F-35As is relatively straightforward because the aircraft already exists. Building an independent nuclear capability around it is an entirely different proposition. The UK’s long-running Dreadnought submarine programme illustrates just how slowly major nuclear procurement projects move.

Quite apart from these enormous practical challenges, the Telegraph’s proposal still doesn’t solve the central strategic problem. If avoiding catastrophe depends on both sides correctly interpreting exquisitely subtle signals under the greatest imaginable pressure, then diplomacy and mutual understanding begin to look less like idealism and more like hard-headed realism - maybe even for the Telegraph.

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That sounds like a startling figure. Norway is an advanced industrial state of more than five million people.

But in Abby Martin’s devastating new documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy, she suggests that the standard figure dramatically understates the true scale of military pollution.

From Norway to Britain

The reason is simple. The ‘Norway’ figure refers to direct military emissions: fuel burned by aircraft, warships, military vehicles and bases. Martin’s film asks a more ambitious question: how about we count the wider military-industrial system? What if we include arms production, military infrastructure, and actual warfare?

Citing projected emissions from the broader US-led military system, including NATO-related military expansion, the film references a figure approaching 295 million tonnes annually.

But, even then, there are all sorts of statistical blindspots. What about the fuel consumed by the military-industrial supply chain and the mining of raw materials used in weapons systems? What about the massive quantities of concrete and steel required for reconstruction? The hospitals that treat the wounded, that may themselves be pulverised and rebuilt?

Left unmentioned in the film, what about the rest of the national security state? What about those gigantic data centres - GCHQ, NSA - sucking up information from billions of devices across the world?

Abby Martin is reluctant to tie down a figure herself. But it could easily be several hundred million tonnes annually. By my calculations, we are no longer talking about Norway. We are talking about CO2 outputs the size of Britain.

One of the most striking moments comes when Martin traces the history of climate negotiations themselves.

According to the film, military emissions received exemptions from scrutiny during the Kyoto process.

Earth’s Greatest Enemy is among Martin’s most ambitious projects. Drawing on years of reporting for Empire Files, it combines investigative journalism, activist inquiry and globe-spanning fieldwork. The access is impressive, taking viewers from Alaska’s glaciers to Iraqi cities, from Hawaii to Okinawa, from military trade shows to climate summits.

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Martin employs the same unsettling, dissonant sonic atmosphere that has become a hallmark of her work. The effect is not merely aesthetic. It reinforces the sense that something is deeply wrong beneath the normalised language of security and strategic interests.

The Bigger Question

The film’s unresolved question concerns scale. Even if every military and national security apparatus on Earth disappeared tomorrow, climate change would not disappear with them. The reduction in military emissions might be significant - perhaps even five or ten percent - but the world would still need to decarbonise electricity generation (30% of emissions), industry (30%), transport (15%), and so on.

Martin argues that the military is not merely an unusually greedy, unaccountable consumer, though. It is also the key system that keeps the fossil-fuel economy running. It is that iron fist in the velvet glove that sustains a wider global system organised around extraction, resource competition and perpetual growth.

The film begins by asking how much carbon the Pentagon emits. It ends by raising a larger question: how much of the modern carbon economy depends upon military power? Martin does not fully answer that question, and neither can she. But by posing it so forcefully, she has identified a blind spot in both climate politics and foreign-policy debate.

After watching Earth’s Greatest Enemy, it becomes impossible to pretend that the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels - the US military industrial complex - is not intimately bound up with the climate crisis.

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Rating: ★★★★★

Earth’s Greatest Enemy was shown 18th June 2026 at the Little Cinema in Bath as part of a community run event. The film is now available on Abby Martin’s YouTube channel.

My posts here are freely accessible. If you find them worthwhile, please consider sharing with friends and making a donation to support my work via a Substack subscription or Paypal. I don’t have a social media profile - what I write and record is here or on YouTube.

But the Kremlin may be on the brink of a folly that would dwarf even its catastrophic 2022 invasion.

This weekend, the Head of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy Sergey Karaganov argued that Russia needs to ‘restore the fear’ of nuclear weapons, claiming his objective is ‘saving the world’. More remarkably still, he suggested that if Russia used nuclear weapons in Europe, ‘we would win the war’ and described nuclear use as ‘a winnable strategy’.

These are extraordinary claims.

Professor Karaganov’s argument is that a conventional Russian strike might cause the West to back down. But that if this does not work, a limited Russian nuclear strike would have to follow to ‘restore deterrence’.

Karaganov’s arguments are not emerging in a vacuum. Earlier this month, Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb used 117 drones hidden inside Russia itself to attack strategic bomber bases far from the front lines. Such attacks - facilitated by the West - increase pressure on decision-makers.

But explaining an argument is not the same thing as accepting it.

International Relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Glenn Diesen have given Karaganov a significant platform. Personally, I think any advocacy of nuclear use - by any side - should be treated with the derision we reserve for hate speech. Excellent scholars, I hope Glenn and John are more forthright in rejecting this lunacy, just as I would hope any interviewer would treat advocates of Holocaust advocacy.

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During the same discussion, Karaganov dismissed concerns about the science behind nuclear winter and minimised the casualty figures at Hiroshima - suggesting that both had been exaggerated during the Cold War to prevent conflict. Such positions are the nukes equivalent of climate denial.

No one knows who will win this war and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. For more than four years, commentators have repeatedly predicted the imminent collapse of one side or the other, only to be proven wrong.

What we do know is that once a nuclear weapon is used, prediction becomes even more difficult. Escalation, retaliation, panic, and miscalculation all become harder to control.

If your plan for ‘saving the world’ entails exploding a nuclear weapon, it is time to ditch the plan. If Putin ultimately comes to believe he faces strategic defeat, we are in a very dangerous position indeed. We must hope he accepts it as a statesman rather than reaching for the Hail Mary advice offered by his close friend Sergey Karaganov.

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The BBC’s Security Correspondent Frank Gardner rightly observed ‘this is how world wars can start,’ after the Ministry of Defence claimed two Russian warplanes ‘repeatedly and dangerously’ intercepted an unarmed RAF spy plane over the Black Sea last month.

A Russian Su-35 fighter approached the surveillance aircraft, getting close enough to trigger the aircraft’s emergency systems and disable its autopilot.

And an Su-27 jet also carried out six passes in front of the RAF plane, getting as close as six metres from its nose.

The MoD says this is the most dangerous Russian action since 2022, when a rogue pilot fired a missile at the same type of plane - a Rivet Joint - also over the Black Sea. Had the missile struck its target, dozens of British personnel could have been killed.

Notably, Gardner himself served in the British Army before joining the BBC.

Scourge of the Spin Machine was one of the few channels to pick up the 2022 incident, which had been left unreported for a year after it occurred.

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There is another precedent for such near-misses. In 2001, a collision between an American EP-3 spy plane and a Chinese interceptor forced the US aircraft to make an emergency landing on Chinese territory, where its 24 crew members were detained. This was before Ukraine, before Trump, before 9/11 - in what now feels like another geopolitical era.

Can anyone imagine a similar incident today taking place between major powers without rapid escalation?

Online discourse likes to insist we are already living through World War Three. Yet the threshold for such a conflict remains much higher: nuclear use, or direct and escalating hostility between the great powers themselves. Incidents like these over the Black Sea are exactly the sort of moments that can bring that world into being.

Gardner repeatedly describes RAF aircraft as ‘monitoring’ activity over the Black Sea. The UK Defence Journal says our planes are simply there to ‘keep an eye on Russia’. How thoughtful of them.

Whatever share of blame falls on each side, the broader lesson should be obvious: when nuclear powers play aerial games of chicken, luck eventually runs out.

Pulling back from the brink should not be treated as weakness, but as survival.

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‘The Russians have been doing disinformation, propaganda since the time of the Tsar… we don’t do disinformation; what we do is operationalising the truth - that is the big difference.’

Sir Alex’s claim encapsulates a major problem - not least because no one picked him up on it.

His assertion only makes sense if you accept that propaganda is just something other people do.

Governments, commentators and intelligence agencies all insist that propaganda is worse than ever. But their negative labels for everything - whether misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation - are often more like insults than serious diagnoses. And the scholarly field supposedly dedicated to making sense of propaganda is in a mess.

That’s the argument we make in a new academic article currently under review with a leading journal of political science. Put another way: propaganda is everywhere, but Propaganda Studies is… nowhere.

The word ‘propaganda’ is used more frequently than at the height of the First World War. References to Propaganda Studies have also increased significantly since its previous peak in the late twentieth century. But there are almost no departments or research centres organised around Propaganda Studies. ‘Propaganda’ appears outside the top five thousand book categories on Amazon, according to scattered datasets. It certainly does not appear once in academic journal titles indexed by Scopus.

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So one of the most morally charged concepts in political life is being handled by a very sketchy field. There are related fields, but they tend to recast propaganda into more neutral categories: ‘discourse’, ‘framing’, ‘narrative’. The harder question - how pernicious are campaigns of organised deceit by a whole range of power systems - is quietly sidestepped.

Not only that, the people studying propaganda are often so deeply divided that discussion is impossible.

(Above) Roddy Piper in the cult conspiracy motion picture, They Live (1988), in which a magic pair of sunglasses allow you to see the truth.

In a 2020 issue of Misinformation Review, Tom Wilson and Kate Starbird argued that criticism levelled at the White Helmets - the Syrian Civil Defence organisation accused of being terrorists - was just a Russian disinformation campaign.

Tim Hayward accepted that Russian outlets amplified critical perspectives on Syria’s civil war, but argued that amplification does not itself prove Kremlin interference.

Misinformation Review accepted Hayward’s response.

Then it was not published.

Whether Hayward was right is not the point. The argument never happened where it mattered. The dispute was not simply about facts. It was about what level of evidence is needed before a ‘disinformation campaign’ can be said to exist. And instead of that question being openly fought out in the same venue, the rebuttal disappeared from the journal.

I had a similar experience in 2021 moments prior to my article on media research was due to be published by The Conversation, a news outlet that uses scholarly specialists instead of journalists. My group’s article identified the clearest cases from the Vietnam War to the Ukraine War where the media excluded uncomfortable facts from publication or broadcast. Just minutes before publication, the founder/ editor-in-chief intervened and unceremoniously deleted every example we had written in our draft.

That is not how a functional field behaves.

One of the most revealing recent disputes in propaganda scholarship concerns Emma Briant and David Miller, both of whom emerged from the Glasgow Media Group but have since taken sharply divergent paths. Indeed, Bristol University fired Miller for apparently making a student feel ‘unsafe’ amid a bigger row about his ‘anti-Zionist’ beliefs.

David Miller treats Western security institutions as structurally implicated in propaganda production. In a lengthy investigation, he argues that Emma Briant’s career illustrates how critical academics can become socialised into national security networks. He documents her interactions with the Pentagon and NATO. He places particular emphasis on her relationships with figures such as Joel Harding and Steve Tatham, both of whom had backgrounds in strategic communications and intelligence.

Emma Briant argues that engagement with such institutions provides insight - and the possibility of acting as a critical voice within them. In private correspondence cited by Miller, she acknowledges the risk of being ‘used,’ while also suggesting she could be a ‘positive influence.’

But the blasé nature of Emma Briant’s work on propaganda theory so far gives little cause for confidence, on that score.

In one of the few academic articles outlining the field, Briant links the emergence of modern propaganda scholarship in the 1920s to the rise of fascist and Stalinist propaganda in Europe, citing Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) and Edward Bernays’ Propaganda (1928). But neither of these books is directly concerned with fascism. And Stalin had not yet consolidated power when Lippmann’s was published. Briant’s airy take helps explain her claim that the field of Propaganda Studies is in ‘good health.’ Clearly, it isn’t.

But the problem exists within anti-imperialist strands of Propaganda Studies, too.

To illustrate, look at the contrast between two titans of propaganda analysis, Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti. Both operate within anti-imperialist traditions. Both are sceptical of US power. But their evidential thresholds are very different.

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Chomsky is highly restrained when it comes to causal claims about covert action and conspiracy. Even where a theory like the 1963 President Kennedy assassination conspiracy appears plausible, he resists closure when proof is elusive.

Parenti, by contrast, is willing to move from contextual plausibility to decisive interpretation. In his writing on the Kennedy assassination, he concedes there is ‘no smoking gun,’ insisting instead that commentators must work ‘by a process of accretion’ until ‘a picture emerges.’

Chomsky may appear the more academically rigorous. But over-caution also has its downsides. Most recently, Chomsky’s ‘overly trusting nature’ led to ‘poor judgment’ in befriending Jeffrey Epstein, according to Chomsky’s wife Valeria. Chomsky has always been less interested in the intentions of individuals. Notwithstanding the man’s genius, there comes a point where focusing on structures obscures the outsized role of real manipulators.

Norman Finkelstein’s discussion of Amnesty International’s treatment of Israel’s assault on Gaza is also illustrative here. Because Israel denied access to relevant sites, Amnesty adopted an agnostic posture toward accusations of war crimes in 2014. Finkelstein’s point is that this sort of evidentiary caution, while superficially responsible, can in practice reward powerful actors who block scrutiny.

Such disagreements are not peripheral. They go to the heart of how propaganda is identified. Consider the work of Mark Crispin Miller (MCM), a prominent scholar with a huge Substack presence of over 46k subscribers and an upcoming documentary about his life and work. MCM ran a longstanding course on Propaganda at New York University until his controversial remarks about masking during the pandemic led to it being scrapped in 2020.

MCM’s focus was ‘always on the media spectacle,’ and he thinks that where consensus is repeatedly asserted, a ‘credible counterclaim… should get a hearing.’ He points to the 9/11 Truth movement as an example of claims dismissed ‘out of hand’ as conspiracy theory.

The difficulty lies in applying this criterion consistently. Mark Dery captured MCM’s drift in a Chronicle of Higher Education profile titled ‘The Professor of Paranoia’, codifying his belief that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings and the 1969 moon landing were faked. MCM later asserted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was committing genocide on Israelis by allowing the Covid-19 vaccine into Israel.

The field therefore fails in opposite directions at once: it sees conspiracies wherever it wants, or misses them entirely.

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The Russiagate affair shows this at the level of great power rivalry.

What began as empirical questions about Russian-linked activity during the 2016 US election expanded into a larger narrative framework through which the Democratic Party closely tied Trump to the designs of Vladimir Putin.

Critics like Aaron Maté, Stephen Cohen and Oliver Boyd-Barrett challenged the strength of the empirical evidence. Meanwhile, debate over the Democratic Party’s hacked emails brought in further disputes, pointing to the DNC itself creating Russiagate as narrative cover for its own shortcomings.

Our point is not to settle Russiagate here. It is to observe how rapidly the controversy slid across evidentiary domains. Intelligence attribution became courtroom proof, prosecutorial claims became historical certainty, and scepticism often recoded as denial. We call this epistemic drift in action.

So, what does this all mean?

Propaganda Studies often appears as the academy’s poltergeist: loud in accusation, thin in substance.

That is harsh, but not unfair.

A field devoted to analysing persuasion, distortion and power cannot afford to operate without clearer standards for distinguishing inference from overreach, caution from evasion, and disagreement from corruption.

We are no strangers to this sort of empirical research. Ben Thomason’s PhD thesis picked through myth and reality in the Syrian White Helmets story, leading to mixed conclusions. In my own work, I spent years investigating alleged conspiracies - JFK, Gary Devore, the CIA’s role in Hollywood - sometimes confirming documented state or corporate involvement, sometimes seeing the evidentiary basis fall away.

Our proposed remedy is not academic consensus. It is what’s sometimes termed ‘structured pluralism.’ In practice, this mean that commentators should meet minimal commitments: state your level of analysis; say what you count as sufficient evidence; make your normative assumptions explicit; engage the strongest opposing literature, and specify what would weaken your conclusions. Tim Hayward makes similar recommendations in a recent academic article but where was it actually placed? A journal obscurely called Social Epistemology.

None of this is to suggest we abolish politics from propaganda research. But if the field cannot distinguish evidence from accusation, it doesn’t explain propaganda. It reenacts it.

[Above] YouTube version of this article.

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Copyright © Matthew Alford and Benjamin Thomason, all rights reserved, 2026

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NewsCord examined 11,295+ classified excerpts from 686 articles across four major outlets - BBC, Sky News, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera - covering the period 11 October 2023 to 21 April 2025.

Each excerpt was coded for attribution (who is identified as responsible), voice (active vs passive), qualification (how sources are framed), and other measurable features of reporting.

What emerges is not a series of isolated editorial choices, but a pattern.

• The BBC attributes Israeli attacks explicitly in just 50% of cases, with Sky News and The Guardian only slightly higher at 54%. By contrast, Al Jazeera names the perpetrator 89% of the time.

• The BBC uses passive voice in nearly 80% of Palestinian casualty sentences, softening or removing direct responsibility.

• Framing of sources also differs sharply. The BBC labels Gaza’s health ministry “Hamas-affiliated” in 60% of death toll citations, yet mentions that the UN considers these figures credible in just 0.6% of cases.

• Sky News allocates nearly twice as much space to Israeli perspectives (28%) as to Palestinian ones (15%), while Al Jazeera is the only outlet to give greater space to Palestinian voices.

• The BBC uses humanising language for Israeli captives roughly twice as often as for Palestinian captives.

• Legal terminology is comparatively rare in UK coverage. The term “genocide” appears 12 times on Sky News, 15 times on the BBC, and 21 times in The Guardian, compared to 58 mentions on Al Jazeera.

The Question of Omission

Perhaps more striking than what is included is what is absent.

The analysis finds that the BBC has reported only one genocidal statement from a senior Israeli leader, despite organisations such as Law for Palestine documenting hundreds of such statements.

The BBC never reported the following statements in this dataset:-

“We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
— Yoav Gallant, Defence Minister · 9 October 2023

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.”
— Isaac Herzog, President of Israel · 12 October 2023

“They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
— Israel Katz, Energy Minister · 13 October 2023

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you… and we do remember.”
— Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister · 28 October 2023

“Dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza is an option.”
— Amichai Eliyahu, Heritage Minister · 5 November 2023

“It might be justified and moral to starve 2 million people.”
— Bezalel Smotrich, Finance Minister · August 2024

“Erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
— Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset · 7 October 2023

“Jericho Missile! … Doomsday weapon!”
— Tally Gotliv, Knesset Member · 9 October 2023

“Right now, one goal: Nakba!”
— Ariel Kallner, Knesset Member · October 2023

Newscord’s findings are in keeping with similar work by media analysts like Media Lens, Declassified, and the Glasgow Media Group.

These patterns raise serious questions about how British media represent responsibility, legality, and civilian suffering in this conflict.

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Despite it starring Jude Law and Paul Dano, I sat completely alone in the cinema. Indeed, I had to travel to an industrial estate to watch it, and my shoes are still wet from the long walk back into town.

That in itself is slightly odd. A film about Vladimir Putin and the making of modern Russia - based on a best-selling 2022 book - would seem to have a ready-made audience. And yet The Wizard of the Kremlin has arrived slowly and silently. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last August and was slated for cinemas in January… but that date quietly came and went without explanation. It finally emerged in the UK on Friday last week and, even now, is on limited release - with America still not getting it until May.

The story follows the rise of Putin through the eyes of a fictional adviser - a figure clearly modelled on Vladislav Surkov. This ‘wizard’ - a sort of ‘Peter Mandelson of Moscow’ - moves from theatre into television and then into politics, always shaping the narrative through which power is consolidated in Russia.

The adviser is cast as ‘the new Rasputin’: a shadowy, enigmatic figure, influencing the ruler without ever fully appearing in the foreground. The trope gives the audience an immediate handle on the story - and quietly suggests that power is best understood through hidden personalities rather than visible structures, or even money.

Part of what makes the film effective is that it does not play this idea in an exaggerated way. The institutions - TV networks, oligarch circles, the Boris Yeltsin presidency - are presented with flair. At one point, Yeltsin is so drunk when giving a Presidential speech that he has to be strapped upright into his chair - at which point he goes on to win the election because Boris Berezovsky throws his media empire behind him: ‘Stop making up stories. Start shaping reality!’ the tycoon screams.

But this is also where the film’s realism begins to narrow. While certain elements are rendered in detail, others are compressed into neat, almost slogan-like explanations. The most obvious example is the idea that Russians ‘dream of verticality’ - a strong, hierarchical form of power to replace the disorder of the post-Soviet years.

By focusing so heavily on a Surkov-like figure, it effectively explains the emergence of the Putin system through the actions of a single, highly intelligent manipulator - the ‘Rasputin’ trope. This view was popularised by Adam Curtis, who portrayed Surkov as a pioneer of ‘postmodern’ politics, blurring reality and fiction in a way that later echoed beyond Russia - into the Trump administration. ‘Monopolising power was no longer enough,’ our protagonist declares. ‘We needed to monopolise subversion.’

Surkov spent two decades in and around the Kremlin. But whether he was really the all-explaining ‘wizard’ of the system is another matter. When I spoke to Russian colleagues, they were notably sceptical of the near-mythic status he has acquired in Western commentary: ‘He was indeed quite influential’ but ‘nowadays relegated to writing pretentious smart-sounding op eds at an obscure web publication that nobody really reads’.

This becomes clearest when the film approaches its most controversial material. The apartment bombings that preceded the second Chechen war are introduced with a striking line: ‘They say we [the Putin government] were behind it… I don’t know’. The suggestion of a false-flag operation is there, along with a nod to the existence of ‘serious evidence.’ But the film does not pursue the claim.

That allows the film to engage with the most explosive conspiracy theory about Putin’s ascent - the idea that he attacked his own citizens to justify a consolidation of power. But the burden of proof is avoided. The same strategy appears elsewhere in the film, including in its treatment of Russia’s Internet Research Agency and its alleged interference in the 2016 US election.

In fact, something similar happens at the end. The assassination of the titular character arrives abruptly and cheaply. The real Surkov, of course, remains very much alive.

In all, the film is thoughtful, detailed, and often convincing on issues of media, power, and political change. But when it reaches the point where those debates would require firm conclusions - about agency, responsibility, or the true drivers of the system - it hesitates. In that hesitation, it does a good job artistically, even if the two and a half hour runtime will put off many without an active interest in international relations or contemporary Russia.

Marandi has been eviscerating Western commentators on Channel 4 News, Piers Morgan Uncensored, and the BBC on the Iran War. But how - and why?

The traditional view of Byron is that he was this brilliant poet who through travel managed to transcend the prejudices of his age.

That view is honed for his final piece of work, 1819’s Don Juan. In its 555 pages, a naive young man is dragged across Europe and the Ottoman world, surviving shipwreck, slavery, war, and high society. Along the way the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ rebel Byron satirises everyone.

Professor Marandi’s reading of Don Juan is a direct attack on that consensus. He argues that Byron is still working within the same underlying framework as his earlier, cruder works.

What’s at stake here is not just literary interpretation. It’s who gets to describe the world - and who gets believed.

Byron sets himself up as an authority on ‘the Orient’. He pointedly reminds readers he has ‘travell’d ’mongst the Turks.’ He adds footnotes. He adopts the tone of someone reporting, not inventing.

It creates an illusion of expertise. Byron presents ‘Allah! Hu!’ as a Muslim war cry. Marandi points out this isn’t meaningful Arabic. Byron invents a ‘holy camel’s hump’ - something Marandi says does not exist in Islam.

And yet critics, then and now, largely take Byron at his word.

From here, Marandi makes a broader structural observation. Byron’s two worlds are treated very differently: England is historically specific and evolving. Anything East if Istanbul is timeless, static, and monolithic.

In the seraglio episode, Don Juan refuses submission, humiliation, and conversion. At one point he declares:

Heads bow, knees bend… And hands obey – our hearts are still our own.

The implied division is hard to miss. The East is associated with submission, ritual, and despotism, while the West is associated with inner freedom, dignity, and selfhood.

Poetry scholars have treated the portrayal of one of the Sultan’s young wives, Gulbeyaz, as psychologically rich, even realistic. Marandi counters that she is actually irrational, emotionally excessive, sexually driven, and unable to understand freedom. Gulbeyez and the harem become a concentrated image of the Orient — luxurious, decadent, and morally degraded.

The pattern becomes unmistakable in some of Byron’s most quotable lines. On Eastern women, he writes:

The Turks do well to shut… The women up…Their chastity… Is not a thing of that astringent quality.

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A similar reduction occurs in the depiction of Muslims in battle:

They… only shouted, “Allah!” and “Bis Millah!”

A single line reduces an entire group to ritualised, ineffective noise, turning religion into shorthand for irrationality.

And in Byron’s treatment of the Sultan:

He… was certain that the earth was square…

This may function as satire, but it also does something broader: the ruler becomes a caricature, and the caricature becomes a civilisation.

During Don Juan’s experiences in The Siege of Ismail, the pattern hardens further. Muslims are portrayed as incompetent, fanatical, driven by empty religious cries, and vicious even in death. At a slave market, he compares the sale of humans with ‘cheapening an ox’ at a ‘Christian fair’. At the same time, Don Juan repeatedly appears as the rescuer of Eastern women from Eastern men. It’s a familiar fantasy - the Orient as a place where white women are taken, and Western men must retrieve them.

Kim Basinger [above] posing with Sean Connery at the filming of an Arab slave market scene in the James Bond shoot for Never Say Never Again (1983).

The Sheik (below) kidnaps Liam Neeson’s daughter in Taken (2008).

Marandi’s critique sharpens further when he turns to Byron’s treatment of Western figures. The Spartan king Leonidas, George Washington, and frontiersman Daniel Boone are all idealised as embodiments of freedom, nobility, and civilisation.

Marandi’s argument on Don Juan might seem severe. But it becomes more persuasive when placed alongside Byron’s earlier work. In Byron’s The Giaour, Muslims are portrayed as fatalistic (‘Kismet!’), defined by vengeance and hatred, and embedded in a world of tyranny. In The Corsair, the “turban’d tyrant” becomes a type, and the East is depicted as sensual, violent, and lawless. In The Bride of Abydos, authority is arbitrary, women are passive, and culture is fatalistic.

My own PhD was about Hollywood movies. Like Marandi, I perhaps tended towards a flattening effect, where even ironic, nuanced, or tonally varied films still fitted inside a propaganda frame. I still wonder if it might have been a bit blank-faced of me to claim that a terrible Christian Bale movie about dragons set in Northern England was really supportive of American foreign policy but hey ho.

Jack Shaheen was an American academic with Lebanese roots. He devoted his life to observing the same patterns of orientalist stereotyping in Hollywood movies, his biggest book being Reel Bad Arabs. I met Jack at a conference and he was a warm, gentle, and soft-spoken man. Through him, I was introduced to what he called an ‘Ali Baba toolkit’ - stories that begin in the desert and quickly fill with evil wizards, flying carpets, incompetent terrorists, black magic, sensual women and lascivious men. It helped my own work become much more sensitive to this sort of stereotyping.

Jack Shaheen was willing to work within the system. He was brought in as an on-set adviser to Hollywood films like the George Clooney Gulf War satire Three Kings (1999) helping turn bad scripts into something far sharper and more unexpected.

Marandi shares a lot of Shaheen’s intellectual frame - of course channeling the great Edward Said - but he’s mixed it with a fiery dose of Foucault. Marandi shows little interest in working with the Western mediated system as one acting in good faith.

I suspect if you caught Marandi in a quiet moment, you might find him to be a fan of Lord Byron, but that doesn’t mean he’s going easy on him - or on the West.

What Marandi represents is not just a critique of literature, but a wider intellectual posture - one that is increasingly unwilling to take Western narratives at face value. That posture doesn’t just unsettle old poets. It unsettles not just old poets, but the authority Western culture has long claimed to define the world—and be believed when it does.

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My posts here are freely accessible. If you find them worthwhile, please consider sharing with friends and subscribing via a paid Substack subscription or on Paypal. I hardly ever use social media - most of what I write and record is here or on YouTube.

I am very much opposed to organised violence and deceit. I’m an antiwar commentator.

Here are some details on my background, and here are endorsements from luminaries like Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, and Tony Benn.

The Best Place To Start

If you want a sense of what I do here, these are the pieces that attracted the most interest.

🔴 On weird narratives

• The Worst Things About Bono

• Don’t Worry – Putin Has Been Fighting On Our Side This Whole Time

🔴 Original research, my life in politics

• The Forgotten PhD that Explains How Iran Sees the West: an obscure thesis that sheds light on a very public voice

• The Final Englishman In Russia: my eerie visit to Moscow

🔴 On media and propaganda

• The BBC’s Subtle Deceptions On Palestine

• 12 Ways the BBC Whitewashed the Gaza War

🔴 On war and geopolitics

• Gaza Is The Worst Bomb Zone – Ever: maybe the grimmest 200 words I’ve written

• The Only Accurate Survival Guide To WWIII: Hmmm, or this one.

My posts here are freely accessible. If you find them worthwhile, please consider sharing with friends and subscribing via a paid Substack subscription or on Paypal. I hardly ever use normal social media - most of what I write and record is here on Substack or on YouTube.

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Yes - Lord Byron, the English 19th century romantic poet.

[Above] Painting of Lord George Byron in Armenian dress. H/t to Bernard Nazarian.

Not nuclear policy. Not sanctions. Not war. That would all come later for the University of Tehran’s ubiquitous professor.

A 73,000-word PhD on Romantic poetry, submitted quietly just as the Iraq War was spiralling into disaster.

Almost nobody read it.

Until now.

Marandi, recently dubbed ‘The Iranian Tucker Carlson’, wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Birmingham.

I was a postgraduate in the same Faculty at the same time. I studied Film; in the corridor directly below me, Marandi was studying English.

[Above] Professor Marandi on Piers Morgan ‘Uncensored’

I just acquired Marandi’s thesis. It had to be digitised, which suggests it only ever existed as a hard copy. In short, it appears to have attracted almost no readership beyond its examiners.

But Marandi’s PhD isn’t just a literary thesis. It’s a blueprint for a way of seeing the world.

In the Acknowledgements, he thanks my old supervisor: Professor Scott Lucas. In his own side drama, Lucas - a critic of the Iranian government - recently told The Times podcast that Marandi warned him in no uncertain terms he’d be jailed if he returned to Iran.

On page 3, Marandi dedicates the thesis to his wife, as well as ‘To the memory of all my friends who lost their lives in the American backed war on Iran’ and ‘To the memory of Imam Ayatollah Khomeini.’

The thesis, Lord Byron, His Critics, and Orientalism, claims that Western literature produces a distorted image of the ‘Orient’ - a colonial term for pretty much anything East of Istanbul.

At first glance, the PhD looks like a standard postcolonial argument, drawing on Michel Foucault and Edward Said.

But Marandi’s intellectual move is to turn on Byron’s defenders. These critics, he argues, repeat basic errors about Islam (religious practices, belief in demons, misuse of terms, etc) and treat Byron as if he had real authority on the East.

The Orient, he says, is rendered ‘primitive, mysterious, exotic and incapable of self-government.’

Marandi's Dissection of Don Juan

It’s not just that Byron’s poems systematically misrepresent the East, it’s the whole of the scholarship around him. This is where the thesis stops being about Byron - and starts being about how knowledge itself is produced.

In Byron’s The Giaour, Islam is portrayed as fatalistic and punitive.
In The Corsair, the East becomes exotic and sensual - a stylised fantasy.
In The Two Foscari, ‘Eastern’ themes are used to explore despotism, subtly linking the East with tyranny and decline.

Then comes the stress test: Don Juan, Byron’s lengthy poetic masterpiece. Here, Byron becomes ironic, self-aware, and critical of Europe itself.

So, you might expect Marandi to go easy on him.

But he doesn’t.

When Byron is crude, Marandi calls it Orientalism. When Byron is ironic, that is still Orientalism - just self-aware.

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None of this is to say that Marandi is simplistic or totalising. ‘The Ottoman rulers were definitely not striving for social justice and the legitimate rights of the people under their rule,’ he says. Rather, Marandi observes that it is the portrayal of ‘ordinary people’ which is ‘problematic’ in Western discourse. He calls the division of the world into East and West, Orient and Occident as ‘a fictitious ideological construction’ and that he does not wish to portray the East as ‘superior’.

Seen in isolation, the thesis is a fairly normal, albeit strong and strident, piece of early-2000s literary theory that well warranted doctoral status.

But Marandi went on to become the most well known Iranian spokesperson in the Western world.

From Literature to Geopolitics

Marandi’s framework leads to a particular orientation toward the world:

• a systemic distrust of Western narratives

• a belief that information is a battleground

• a tendency to see events as part of long-term structural conflict

Marandi’s thesis may have been left unread in a dusty library near Selly Oak for over twenty years.

But as America’s war unravels, the mindset behind it is now shaping the world.

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Abby Martin’s new film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy has prompted renewed discussion about the the role of entertainment in selling war.

Various X accounts have called this a ‘massive bombshell’: that the US military is closely involved in shaping film and TV - including access and storylines.

It’s an important point. Abby is a wonderful journalist. But it isn’t a revelation.

This relationship has already been extensively documented. Our book National Security Cinema (2017), based on thousands of pages of FOIA material, showed how the Pentagon influences scripts in exchange for access. Our film Theaters of War (2022), led by Roger Stahl, extended that analysis to both the Pentagon and CIA.

If anything, what’s striking is not that this is being ‘revealed’ - but that it still needs to be.

And it matters now. As tensions with Iran explode, familiar narrative patterns are reappearing across both news and entertainment.

Top Gun: Maverick is often treated as pure spectacle. In reality, it is about a daring strike on Iran - produced with Pentagon cooperation.

When Theaters of War was released, Jonathan Cook wrote one of the clearest short explanations of what this system is - and why it persists. We are sharing it here for the first time:

Jonathan Cook

Replay: How the Pentagon dictates Hollywood storylines

Originally published here…

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5 months ago · 118 likes · 22 comments · Jonathan Cook

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“The Monsters of Pig Alley is addressed to an alienated pop star tempted to retreat into the arms of his pre-fame nearest and dearest, despite these uninspiring civilians being “drab … overweight and dated”. The song’s sonic loveliness is soured further by the repetition of that ludicrously disdainful title.”

You can chalk up this intervention to a disagreement in taste and interpretation, but bear with me a moment.

The song is clearly written from the perspective of an ordinary family, who deliberately and ironically call themselves ‘monsters’ who live on ‘pig alley’.

They are writing to their kid who, seeking fame, has lost his way: ‘why don’t you pack it in and come back home?’ they say.

The song ends with their wayward child found dead, having been caught up in a music scene that has resulted in tragedy.

The review reframes the song as Morrissey projecting his own narcissism-casting the central figure as an “alienated pop star.” But there is no real basis for this. Unlike many of his songs, Morrissey himself is largely absent; the figure is simply a precarious would-be musician.

The Guardian calls the song musically lovely but ‘soured’ by the repetition of a ‘ludicrously disdainful title’ but this is to ignore the fact it is a label willingly applied by the family to themselves.

In context notably left unprovided by the Guardian, the story is also not spun out of Morrisey’s one-dimensional mindset but inspired from a 1912 short film called The Musketeers of Pig Alley.

None of this is especially dramatic. There’s no obvious misquotation or outright error. But the cumulative effect is to invert the song’s emotional centre while maintaining the appearance of straightforward criticism.

There is a bigger point here, of course. This Substack is, after all, about war and organised deceit.

But hey, it’s just a song. Just a difference of opinion. Just a newspaper.

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Oil prices have surged above $100 per barrel, and global markets are jittery as the conflict threatens the largest energy disruptions since the 1970s.

Trump is clearly searching for an off-ramp.

Don’t believe me?

Did you see him attempt a jocular ramble about how he chose the name Operation Epic Fury?

Did you see him boast about how much he’s already won - while insisting he’d just like to win a bit more?

Did you see the latest desperate war propaganda pumped out by the White House on X?

My instinct is that this war will get worse. The U.S. and Israel may well simply refuse to back down because to do so would mean the worst defeat since Vietnam. Trump will do anything to avoid being a loser.

But there is another possibility.

Trump has also been escalating rhetoric against Cuba. At a Latin American summit earlier this month he threatened drastic measures in the region and signalled renewed hostility toward Havana. At the same time, U.S. pressure on the island has intensified through energy restrictions that are worsening Cuba’s already severe economic crisis.

Taken together, the pattern suggests a familiar manoeuvre: shifting attention from one theatre of conflict to another.

Trump’s political communication strategy has long relied on speed and saturation - moving rapidly between controversies, “flooding the zone,” and preventing sustained scrutiny of any single issue. In that context, a sudden pivot from Iran to Cuba should not be dismissed.

There is even a historical precedent.

On 23 October 1983, a suicide truck bombing destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. The Middle East braced for retaliation.

But the retaliation never came.

Instead, just two days later - on 25 October 1983 - President Ronald Reagan launched the U.S. invasion of Grenada, sending 7,000 troops into the tiny Caribbean island under the dubious justification of rescuing American medical students and preventing a Marxist takeover.

The US did not meaningfully retaliate for the Beirut bombing and, within months, withdrew from Lebanon entirely.

President Reagan (above) during the US invasion of Grenada.

The political effect was obvious. One crisis buried another.

A similar dynamic could emerge today with Reagan’s most devoted student, Donald Trump.

Iran has no obvious reason to de-escalate a war it believes it can win strategically. Retaliation will likely continue in some form.

But the focus of American political attention does not have to remain in the Middle East.

If the administration pivots toward Cuba, the narrative changes instantly. The story is no longer an inconclusive war in the Persian Gulf.

It becomes a brand-new confrontation, much closer to home, and in keeping with Team Trump’s national security priority of maintaining regional dominance.

And just like that, yesterday’s war disappears from the headlines.

It’s only a theory.

But it’s one I haven’t yet seen articulated.

And if I were Trump-God forbid-it’s exactly the kind of move I might make.

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America has always been bovine, but this latest war is the USA at full-blown Mad Cow Disease. The attack makes little sense and seems likely to backfire horribly.

One explanation emerged this week, courtesy of Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone.

When Trump was asked last week why he authorised the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he gave a blunt, upbeat answer:

“I got him before he got me.”

If that remark reflects Trump’s thinking, it raises a striking possibility. The reckless escalation with Iran - a country that had offered to literally water down nuclear materials to satisfy Washington’s insane demands - may not simply have been about policy or grand strategy.

There may be a direct line between Trump’s famous bloodied ear in July 2024 and oil surging past $100 a barrel.

Trump survived that assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman fired several rounds at him, grazing his ear. Two weeks later, another armed man was arrested outside a golf course where Trump was playing.

Around the same time, US authorities highlighted a case involving a Pakistani national, Asif Merchant, who was charged with participating in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Trump.

Yet Blumenthal raises serious questions about the nature of the threat - and how such threats are presented.

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The New York Times, covering the trial, reported that Asif Merchant had:

“never been close to realising” the elaborate plot attributed to him.

The case resembles previous counterterrorism stings in which informants played a central role in developing and steering alleged conspiracies.

In The Trump Assassination Plots, journalist Ken Silva wrote:

“A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

An earlier example involved a 2022 Justice Department case accusing an Iranian national of attempting to hire a hitman to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton. Court documents indicated that the only payment sent for this supposed hit was a hundred bucks - and that the hitman turned out to be an FBI informant.

Nevertheless, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on Fox News:

“These people who chant death to America tried to assassinate President Trump twice.”

When asked if Iran was directly responsible, he replied:

“Through proxies, yes. Through their intel, yes. They want to kill him.”

No evidence was produced.

Reporters travelling with the Trump campaign described a palpable sense of anxiety about Iranian hit teams targeting the candidate. At one point, the FBI delivered an alarming warning that Iranian operatives inside the United States had access to surface-to-air missiles.

Fearing that Iran might shoot down “Trump Force One,” Trump began travelling on a decoy “ghost flight” owned by his friend Steve Witkoff, while the rest of his campaign used the main jet.

Also on the decoy plane was Trump’s campaign manager Suzie Wiles, who later became White House chief of staff. Wiles had previously worked on Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in 2020.

By the time Trump returned to the Oval Office, he was surrounded by Israel-aligned advisers and increasingly convinced that Iran had tried to kill him.

The White House amplified the narrative of personal retaliation. In a graphic posted on the official presidential account, Trump declared, like a real-life Mr Burns:

“I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter.”

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth declared:

“Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

Thomas Crooks may have narrowly missed Trump’s head in Butler, Pennsylvania.

But Israel had found a way into the president’s mind.

By March 2026 the US-Iran conflict had escalated into regional war.

At a Pentagon briefing, Hegseth vowed to unleash:

“death and destruction from the sky all day long.”

Trump appears to be a changed man - more paranoid, more reckless, and more easily manipulated by Israel-firsters and neo-fascists.

One can only hope that the destruction of his supposed enemy Khamenei - in reality one of the main obstacles to Iran developing nuclear weapons - might somehow allow the president to declare victory and get the hell out.

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It is conceivable that this will be contained: either the Iranians will calibrate their response after a show of force, or the US - which is building up a massive armada - will have sufficient weaponry to destroy the Iranian government.

I oppose any use of force. Even the very limited Trump-Netanyahu “12 Day War” last year was horrible - hundreds dead, nuclear diplomacy (which was working) abandoned, the US gleefully deceitful.

But what is upcoming in the next few weeks is set to be on a new order of magnitude. I won’t run through the various scenarios, suffice to say that Iran has significant missile capacity and will almost certainly strike Israel - hard. Netenyahu says Israel can absorb 700 missiles. What he left unsaid is that Iran has far more missiles than this.

So, what if Israel is overwhelmed by Iranian strikes?

This “what if?” is hardly even speculation - it is considered probable by mainstream analysts. It’s what happened last June, and may even have led Israel to seek an exit ramp via Washington — John Mearsheimer claims Israel privately pushed Trump for a ceasefire. He certainly brokered one in direct contact with Netanyahu.

No one wants a ground invasion, so victory cannot come through a WWII style invasion of Berlin. But if the US and Israel were facing defeat, they would know that nuclear escalation - from a purely military perspective - quickly turn the tide.

What Americans Actually Support When a War Feels Real

I recently came across an excellent article by Scott Sagan & Benjamin Valentino in International Security. They establish that the apparent long-term decline in Americans’ approval of nuking Hiroshima/Nagasaki doesn’t demonstrate a robust “nuclear taboo” or a deep commitment to civilian immunity.

Polling data shows that approval for Truman’s decision to drop the Bomb fell from 85% in 1945 to 46% in 2015, and that more people now prefer a “demonstration strike” than they did in 1945. However, the authors establish that these trend polls are misleading because they don’t go into the details that actually matter.

They ran a YouGov survey experiment in July 2015 with 780 U.S. adults, which presented a hypothetical war in which Iran violates the 2015 Iran nuclear deal; the U.S. imposes sanctions; Iran attacks a U.S. carrier (2,403 U.S. dead); the U.S. retaliates; a ground invasion stalls; and then the president must choose between continuing the ground war to take Tehran - at the cost of 20,000 more U.S. troops expected to die - or bombing a major Iranian city to force surrender.

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The results were stark. There was majority approval for bombing a city in all conditions, including nuclear use. Approval stayed around 60% even when the nuclear strike killed 2 million civilians, and even when the attack was described as deliberately targeting civilians. With 2 million civilian deaths, a slim majority preferred the ground war - yet approval for the nuclear strike still hovered near 60%, a kind of “rally around the bomb” effect.

Support also increased significantly with Republican identification, older age, and support for the death penalty. Women were no less willing than men to support these strikes; in some scenarios women were more supportive.

They then added a third option: end the war by allowing Ayatollah Khamenei to remain as a spiritual figurehead (with no political power), avoiding both U.S. troop deaths and Iranian civilian deaths. Only about 41% chose the diplomatic deal. 40% still preferred nuking the city rather than compromise on “unconditional surrender,” which suggests pure bloody vengeance, hubris, and assorted nastiness is an important factor.

A poll around the same time found that 30% of Republicans (and 19% of Democrats) were supportive of bombing Agrabah, the fictional city in Aladdin.

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I usually focus on the violence of elites rather than blaming the public for the sins of empire. It’s also true that polling can be gamed by framing and context. But after decades of anti-Iranian propaganda, it seems fair to say that the U.S. public’s unwillingness to oppose war is yet another factor that makes this Spring look set to be a perfect storm.

It’s hard to see Donald Trump - himself one of those elderly Republicans who supports the death penalty - building up such a Navy only to make a deal and sail off home again. If he does, it would be a remarkable about-face, and history might even judge him a peace president, albeit an unconventional one. But the odds point instead to a war that none of the parties can fully control — the kind of regional conflict that draws in powers far beyond the initial battlefield.

As I finish up edits on this article, reports suggest Trump is hesitating, with Netanyahu leaving the White House under a cloud. But given these two are thick as thieves and have lied so brazenly in the past, such reports are cold comfort.

It is not enough to rely on the mercurial, isolationist instincts of a criminal mind, that of Donald Trump. Western publics must get over themselves - right now - and become a force for reigning in their government.

Happy Valentine’s Day :-)

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