The Iran War — The Most Obvious Question Liberal Media Refuses to Ask
Image by Fayegh(Shamal) Shakibayi.
Doubtless, the war launched by US President Donald Trump is not popular among ordinary Americans.
According to the latest public opinion poll, only a minority of Americans—part of the dwindling core of Trump’s supporters—believe that the US-Israeli aggression against Iran has merit.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in early March 2026, only 27 percent of Americans approve of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran—while 43 percent disapprove and 29 percent are unsure.
This pro-war constituency is likely to remain supportive of Trump until the end of his term in office, and long after.
However, the war on Iran is not popular, and it is unlikely to become popular, especially as the Trump administration is reportedly fragmented between those who want to stay the course and those desperate for an exit strategy. Such a strategy would allow their president to save face before the midterm elections in November.
Mainstream media—aside, of course, from the pro-war chorus in right-wing news organizations, podcasters, and think tanks—also recognize that their country has entered a quagmire.
If it continues unchecked, it will likely prove worse than the war in Iraq in 2003 or the long war in Afghanistan, which lasted 20 years and ended with a decisive American defeat in August 2021 following the withdrawal of US forces and the collapse of the Afghan government.
Both wars have cost US taxpayers an estimated $8 trillion, including long-term veteran care and interest on borrowing, according to the Brown University Costs of War Project.
Iran is already promising to be even more costly if the insanity of the war—instigated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war-crazed government—does not end very quickly.
Many Americans may understand the difficult situation in which Trump’s unhinged behavior and his unexplained loyalty to Netanyahu have placed their country. What they rarely confront is the moral dimension of that crisis. 
Though they speak of the war’s failure—the lack of strategy, the lack of preparation, the absence of an end goal, and the confusion surrounding its objectives—very few in mainstream media have taken what should have been the obvious moral position: that the war itself is criminal, unjustifiable, and illegal under international law.
That position should have been obvious the moment the first bomb was dropped over Tehran. The aggression—particularly while negotiations between Iran and the United States were underway under Omani mediation—was ethically indefensible.
Any remaining doubt should have disappeared when US-Israeli strikes hit civilian areas, including schools and residential districts in the city of Minab in southern Iran, killing hundreds of civilians, mostly children and women.
This moral silence is not new. In fact, it has often been masked by a familiar rhetorical device: the selective invocation of women’s rights.
In nearly every US war on Arab and Muslim countries, women’s rights have featured heavily in the propaganda used to justify war. The vast majority of mainstream media organizations, think tanks, human rights groups, and activists—even those who rejected military interventionism on principle—agreed at least on that particular premise: the urgency of women’s rights.
They used Malala Yousafzai as a symbol of girls’ education and women’s rights, presenting her as a model of American benevolence. At the same time, they ignored the fact that among the countless innocent Muslims killed across the Middle East and Asia in the last few decades—some counts place them in the millions—children and women represented a large share of the victims.
The same scenario was repeated in Gaza during the ongoing genocide, where UN agencies estimate that women and children make up roughly 70 percent of the more than 72,200 Palestinians killed since October 2023. According to data compiled by ‘UN Women’ and Gaza’s health authorities, the total includes an estimated 33,000 women and girls.
Yet mainstream media continues to center Israeli claims about abuses of women’s rights by Hamas in Gaza, as if the tens of thousands of women killed and maimed by Israeli bombardment were not even worthy of serious consideration.
The same pattern is now repeating itself in Iran. The administration of Donald Trump—a man known for his degrading views and actions toward women—has been allowed, along with war criminal Netanyahu, to frame the war against Iran as a struggle for women’s rights and liberation.
They cultivated a network of supposed women’s rights activists, presenting them as authentic Iranian voices whose mission was to rescue women from massive human rights abuses in their own country. Even on the Left, many fell into that trap—denouncing Trump on the one hand, while still absorbing and reproducing his and Israel’s propaganda.
Now that thousands of women and children have been killed or wounded in the US-Israel unprovoked, unethical, and illegal war on Iran, many of these same voices have fallen silent, quietly placing women’s rights on hold until the outcome of the onslaught becomes clear.
Though much of the media now expresses doubt about Trump’s war, the moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences.
Complaints about rising energy prices, commentary about Trump’s political immaturity, and criticism of his failure to assess the situation properly before ordering bombs to fall have replaced the moral argument altogether.
Equally absent is Netanyahu’s role in the war, as well as the stranglehold Israel exerts over successive US administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—including the supposedly ‘America First’ president.
This logic dominates much of the mainstream strategic debate. Commentators such as Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, and others have repeatedly argued, in one form or another, that the United States must avoid being consumed by Middle Eastern conflicts and instead concentrate on what they describe as the central geopolitical challenge of our time: the rise of China.
While it is important to highlight the unpopularity of America’s latest military adventure, such opposition must rest on moral and legal grounds.
That said, mainstream liberal media should not be confused with genuine anti-war voices. Their objection to war is rarely principled. They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security.
This is not opposition to war.
It is the logic of war itself.
