America Is Drifting Toward War with Iran—While the Media Snoozes |
In the months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, much of the American media moved in unsettling unison. The dominant narrative, asserted by officials, amplified by commentators, and too often transmitted without sufficient scrutiny, was that war was necessary, imminent, and justified. Only a handful of journalists, most notably the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder, persistently questioned the intelligence, the assumptions, and the rush toward conflict. History would later vindicate their skepticism.
Two decades later, a different but faintly familiar moment may be unfolding.
Today, a formidable U.S. military presence is assembling across the broader Middle East, near Iran. Aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, missile defense systems, and surveillance assets are being repositioned in what officials describe as deterrence, preparation, or contingency planning. Diplomacy continues, but so does military signaling. The possibility, however uncertain, of a U.S. strike on Iranian targets is no longer speculative. It is openly discussed in strategic and policy circles.
And yet, this development has not captured the American public’s attention. It appears in the news, but mostly as background. It does not dominate front pages or headlines. It has not triggered sustained televised debate. Nor has it produced the investigative urgency one might expect when the world’s most powerful military edges closer to confrontation with a major regional power.
The contrast with 2002–03 is striking, not because the media are cheerleading for war today, but because war itself seems normalized.
Then, the media’s failure lay in excessive alignment with official claims. Now, the risk may be different: diffusion of attention. In an era saturated by overlapping crises, Ukraine, Gaza, domestic polarization, economic uncertainty, and large-scale military escalation can become just another headline competing for oxygen. The danger is not propaganda but habituation. War, when treated as routine, escapes scrutiny.
Another factor may be shaping coverage: hesitation born of political fear. The relationship between the press and Donald Trump has long been adversarial and fraught with consequences. Trump has repeatedly attacked major media organizations, labeled critical reporting “fake news,” and encouraged public distrust of journalists. In such an environment, editorial decisions are not made in a vacuum. Newsrooms must weigh not only evidence and professional judgment, but also the political costs of confrontation.
This raises an uncomfortable question: has the threshold for aggressive scrutiny risen when the subject touches Trump and national security at the same time?
Unlike in 2002–03, when media momentum largely aligned with the Bush administration’s push toward war, today we may be witnessing a different dynamic, not endorsement, but restraint. Editors may hesitate to sound an alarm over military escalation involving Iran for fear of being cast as partisan, alarmist, or oppositional. The result is not propaganda, but caution, perhaps excessive caution, at precisely the moment when democratic oversight requires boldness.
Self-censorship is rarely visible. It leaves no headline, no leaked memo, no explicit directive. It appears instead in tone: muted urgency, limited investigative follow-through, and an inclination to frame military buildup as routine rather than extraordinary. Yet the effect can be profound. When fear, whether of political backlash, public attack, or institutional reprisal, enters the newsroom, the range of acceptable discourse can narrow quietly.
Another striking feature of the moment is not only muted news coverage, but the absence of sustained debate on the opinion pages of major American newspapers.
In the months preceding the Iraq invasion, the public sphere, however flawed, was saturated with argument. Editorial boards, columnists, policy experts, and former officials openly engaged the central question: should the United States go to war?
The debate was imperfect and often skewed, but it existed. Americans could observe competing claims about security, legitimacy, risk, and consequence.
Today, as the possibility of military confrontation with Iran again enters strategic discussion, such a debate is difficult to find. One sees scattered commentary, occasional warnings about escalation, and legal arguments about presidential authority. But the core strategic question, whether attacking Iran, even if diplomacy fails, serves the national interest of the United States, has not become the sustained subject of public argument in the country’s leading newspapers.
This absence matters.
War is not merely a technical or tactical matter for specialists. It is the gravest political decision a democracy can make. Its consequences are measured not only in military outcomes but in human lives, regional stability, global economic shock, and long-term strategic entanglement. Such a decision requires visible deliberation. Citizens must see the arguments, hear the disagreements, and understand the stakes before events overtake them.
The silence is particularly striking given the magnitude of the question. Iran is not a marginal actor; it is a large, resilient state capable of retaliation across multiple domains, direct and indirect, conventional and asymmetric. Any American strike, even a limited one, would risk escalation beyond its initial objectives. Whether such a course advances U.S. security, prevents greater danger, or invites prolonged conflict is precisely the kind of question that demands rigorous, sustained public debate.
Yet the debate remains faint.
\Part of this may reflect fragmentation in today’s media ecosystem, where attention splinters quickly and no single issue dominates for long. But part of it may also reflect caution, an institutional hesitation to move from reporting events to confronting their implications. And, as suggested earlier, political pressure may play a role. When national security, presidential authority, and polarized politics intersect, editorial boldness can give way to restraint.
The buildup near Iran deserves deeper, sustained examination for several reasons.
First, the strategic stakes are enormous. Iran is not Iraq in 2003. It is larger, more populous, and more militarily capable, with regional networks and the capacity to respond across multiple theaters, including Israel. Escalation in such environments is rarely linear and often unpredictable. Military action intended as limited can become expansive through retaliation, miscalculation, or alliance dynamics.
Second, the domestic dimension matters. The American public, shaped by the long shadow of Iraq and Afghanistan, has shown little appetite for another open-ended conflict in the Middle East. Yet public consent requires public awareness. If military confrontation is even a serious possibility, citizens deserve sustained, prominent, and critical coverage, not episodic reporting buried within a crowded news cycle.
Third, the lessons of Iraq remain incomplete. The failure before 2003 was not merely an intelligence error; it was institutional. Too many media organizations relied heavily on official sources, treated dissenting analysis as marginal, and framed war primarily as a policy choice rather than a human and strategic rupture. The result was a narrowing of debate at the very moment when democratic deliberation was most needed.
Today’s situation is not identical, but the structural questions persist. Are journalists interrogating assumptions about deterrence and escalation? Are alternative expert views receiving sustained attention? Are potential costs, such as regional war, civilian toll, and global economic disruption, being explored with the seriousness they warrant? Or is military preparation being absorbed into the normal grammar of geopolitics, reported as movement without meaning?
Responsible scrutiny is not the same as opposition to policy. It is the essence of democratic oversight. Governments plan for contingencies; militaries posture; crises ebb and flow. But when the threshold of possible war approaches, journalism’s role is not merely to track ships and planes. It is to illuminate implications before decisions harden into events.
One might argue that the media have learned from Iraq, that the absence of overt cheerleading is itself evidence of progress. That is partly true. Yet a subtler challenge has emerged: normalization. In a world of permanent tension, even the prospect of war risks becoming conceptually ordinary, another scenario in an endless chain of crises. When that happens, the burden on journalism grows heavier, not lighter.
The danger is not that Americans are being persuaded into war, but that they may drift toward it without fully confronting whether it serves the country’s true interests.
In retrospect, Knight Ridder’s legacy was not simply that it questioned faulty intelligence. It demonstrated that even when national momentum leans toward conflict, rigorous journalism can widen debate, complicate assumptions, and slow the rush to consensus. That legacy remains relevant, not as a call to predict war, but as a reminder to examine it before it arrives.
If negotiations with Iran fail and military options move closer to reality, the American public should not encounter that moment as a sudden fait accompli. The question of war should not emerge only after decisions are made. It must be argued before they are taken.
War may or may not come. But normalization, distraction, or fear are not neutral conditions. They shape how societies move toward or away from the gravest decisions. And in a democracy, no decision is graver than the decision to wage war.
Please check out my new book, Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.
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