It would take 1.74 news cycles to have most of the population of the west baying for blood.

That’s how good the machine is…

You mean like how every strike that Israel does is just treated as a fact of life, but any strike Iran does, even if in direct response to an Israeli strike, is an “unprecedented escalation”?

The article is excellent in enumerating the false narratives being pushed by propagandists to embed false justifications for war in people’s minds, but Gantz and Stephens don’t reach the average American. The real story there is the debate moderators lying about their nuclear program, because that was widely viewed, and more importantly, was presented casually as though it were just an understood fact, and, as we know, retractions and corrections post-debate don’t matter.

Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has written that since “the world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all… had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.” Foreign policy analyst Thomas Powers observes that nuclear states “cannot be casually threatened,” so Iran’s leaders may believe possession of nuclear weapons could “save Iran from a similar fate” as Iraq.

I think that Iraq was sort of the culmination of Cold War era “first strike” mentality propaganda, because the argument was that Iraq already had WMDs. Are nukes sort of their own special subclass? Sure. But I remember back then hearing that Iraq was totally going to deploy their chemical and maybe even biological weapons against their neighbors, with a sort of unspoken “that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”-meme, in order to prevent them progressing to a point where their hypothetical delivery vehicles could some day reach the US or Europe. Point is, I’m not even sure that Americans are deterred by a nuclear threat anymore, if they can be sold on a “successful” first strike.