Bigotry , Economic Cost , Endangerment , Environment , Immorality , Myth of Benefits , Myth of Inevitability , Myth of Justness , Myth of Necessity , North America , World

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 28, 2026

Excerpted from War Is Still A Lie .

Since I wrote War Is A Lie in 2010 and updated it in 2015, the lies used to prop up wars have varied but continued. My summary remains true:

Not a single thing that we commonly believe about wars that helps keep them around is true. Wars cannot be good or glorious. Nor can they be justified as a means of achieving peace or anything else of value. The reasons given for wars, before, during, and after them (often three very different sets of reasons for the same war) are all false. It is common to imagine that, because we’d never go to war without a good reason, having gone to war, we simply must have a good reason. This needs to be reversed. Because there can be no good reason for war, having gone to war, we are participating in a lie.

But some things have changed. The Iraq Syndrome has ended. The Iraq Syndrome, modeled on the Vietnam Syndrome, was a reluctance to support more wars because of the experience of having lived through the Iraq War. Such reluctance is generally understood as an illness rather than as temporary enlightenment. While John Kerry, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and many other Iraq War supporters who didn’t come as close as they did, all failed to become president, Donald Trump and Joe Biden did not fail.

Both Trump and Biden did the Iraq Syndrome the courtesy of pretending they had opposed attacking Iraq. There’s no evidence that Trump had done that. Biden had in reality been a leading supporter of launching that war. Apparently lying about that past was seen as a sufficient level of decency for this new age. But there was no requirement that, even in retrospect, you criticize the Iraq War for a reason suggesting a general aversion to wars. Trump’s most common criticism was that the United States had failed to take Iraq’s oil . It was nice to think he was joking, but President Trump spoke at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency on January 23, 2017, and promoted a policy of waging wars for the theft of resources.

Major ground wars with thousands of U.S. troops dying are now being avoided. As U.S. deaths are the only deaths that count for much in most corporate U.S. journalism, this can create the impression that wars have largely gone away, the focus on the small number of U.S. deaths in the war on Iran, and on the lying about them, not withstanding.

U.S. media coverage of wars, when it happens, tends to downplay the U.S. role. The war in Ukraine received major attention for a time — including absolutely remarkable coverage of war victims (if all sides of all wars were covered the way one side of this one was, war might just shrivel up and die). But mostly the war in Ukraine was falsely depicted as something the U.S. government had little or nothing to do with . . . and ought to have more to do with. The war on Gaza also garnered attention — including through the new power of social media to influence corporate media — but much of the reporting was heavily slanted toward defending those engaged in genocide. Any reports of denunciation by U.S. officials of the mass killing tended to helpfully omit the U.S. role in arming, funding, legally protecting, and collaboratively propagandizing in support of it. As the corporate media took seriously U.S. claims to “oppose” the horrors being inflicted on Palestinians, the satirical journal, The Onion, ran the headline: “Trump Writes Netanyahu Strongly Worded Check.”

Wars continued, of course, by the dozens, including air wars, drone wars, proxy wars, U.S.-armed wars, coups, and imperial national takeovers under the threat of war. I was surprised in visiting Venezuela, shortly after the U.S. military had attacked its capital and kidnapped its president, how frequently people brought up their fear of meeting the same fate as Gaza — that is, absolute devastation.

Major lies that have gone largely unquestioned include the lie that, despite so many horrible and unpopular wars, there may be a good war soon, the lie that funding war preparations is disconnected from funding wars, the dangerous new lie that funding war preparations is a public service of which we can never have too much, and the lie that war is something that people or governments all do to roughly the same extent.

Of …