Fox Presents Condi Rice to Sell the Iran War: Same Scripts, Same Sociopathic Cast as Iraq
Condoleezza Rice, architect of Iraq War lies—false WMD claims and 9/11 ties—now leads Fox’s push for Iran war using the same 2002 script: nuclear threats despite "degraded" programs. The U.S. targets non-nuclear states like Iran while ignoring Russia or China, yet frames 47 years of covert conflict as sudden aggression. Polls show public opposition, but warmongers exploit fear, repeating Vietnam-to-Afghanistan playbooks where ideology trumps security. Rice’s Ukraine war crime condemnation contrasts with her past advocacy for invasions, exposing a pattern of sociopathic consistency in U.S. military interventions. [Automatically generated summary]
Maybe I'm being naive, but and I've talked about this before, I continue to be amazed that when the U.S. government tries to sell this new war with Iran and all of the drama that accompanies it, all the melodramatic claims, they don't even bother.
Like there's no pretense at all, either on the part of the government or their media allies to even change the script a little bit that they used to sell prior wars, including the most discredited one of all, which was Iraq.
And not only have they not changed the script, they're using exactly the same script.
They're not even changing the cast of actors that were used to sell the Iraq war.
It's the same people saying exactly the same things.
I suppose they're counting on.
Either people not remembering what happened 25 years ago or enough time having passed for there to be enough people who didn't live through it or who don't recall it or for them to just be swamped by patriotic fervor and war fever and not care.
Or maybe they are reasoning that, well, it worked in Iraq and even kind of worked in Syria and Lebanon and Libya and Afghanistan and before that, Vietnam, why wouldn't it work this time?
As it turns out, polls are showing overwhelmingly, and we maybe do a separate article or video on this, that it's not working.
The American public is overwhelmingly opposed to this new war for reasons that I think are so obvious.
And yet, Fox News in particular, that served as the chief cheerleader for the Iraq war, accusing everybody who was opposed to it of being pro-terrorist, of not caring about the Iraqi people, the whole litany of things that we're hearing now.
They cheerled the war then.
They're cheerleading it.
They're cheerleading it now 24 hours a day, nonstop.
They decided that the person they wanted to bring on to explain to the audience why the Iran war was so necessary is one of the primary architects of the Iraq war, one of the primary architects of the war itself and the selling of it to the American public based on lies, which is Condoleezza Rice, who was George W. Bush's national security advisor during the first term of his administration when they invaded Iraq, and then his Secretary of State during the second term when they continued to prosecute that war after all the things they promised would happen about a quick end,
about a easy and peaceful destruction of the Iraqi government.
We'd welcome his liberators when none of that happened.
And if you are somebody who is in the highest positions of government and you lie the country into a devastating war, I mean, if you lie the country into a war at all, even if it's extremely quick and successful by its own stated metrics, that alone should be enough to disqualify you.
But if you lead the country into war based on lies that is unfathomably destructive, even according to the architects of the war, like Tony Blair, who admits that it was the Iraq war that created the power vacuum into which ISIS emerged, necessitating a whole variety of other wars, how do you not just go into hiding for the rest of your life?
How is it possible that you could still be presented as a credible source of understanding and advocacy about a brand new war in that exact region, any neighboring country, based on exactly the same scripts?
I talked earlier last week about how when I was up here as Morgan, the guest they presented before I came on to sell the Iran war was Mike Pence, who was a member of Congress, voted for the Iraq war, spent the next decade or two selling and justifying the Iraq war.
He's one of the people that to this date does not admit it's a mistake, has never apologized for it, doesn't even regret it.
And I talked about, and then I listened to him, and it was like being catapulted in a time machine back in 2002, 2003.
So Fox News goes and excavates Condoleezza Rice from whatever underground lair in which she lurks these days to present her as one of the most credible experts in national security and to explain why the war in Iran is justified.
And she ended up saying exactly the things she said about Iraq, exactly the things she said about Iraq 24, 23 years ago when she was trying to convince the American public to support it.
Here's just one example.
She was on with Brett Baer.
So this is like their flagship news show, not just one of their, you know, tawdry Sean Hannity-like cable shows.
Then, of course, you had the events of June when the administration decided, along with the Israelis, to try and at least degrade and maybe even seriously set back Iranian nuclear capabilities.
In order to do that, they were able.
All right.
She's saying, do you see how like slimy she is at the language already?
We were told the purpose, she says, was to seriously degrade Iran's nuclear program or set them back.
That's not what we were told.
We were told that that nuclear program was totally and completely obliterated.
And anyone who suggested that maybe that's a little bit hyperbolic and that we're going to be hearing in six months or a year that we have to go to war with Iran again to again bomb their nuclear facilities, President Trump at the White House said, you're disgusting.
You're disrespecting the troops.
You're spewing fake news.
There's still a very bombastic document on the White House site, the official site saying President Trump and the U.S. military completely obliterated, totally and completely obliterated the Iran's nuclear program.
And anyone who says anything to the contrary is spreading fake news.
Now, knowing that you can't reconcile that claim from eight months ago with the fact that we now have to go to war to stop Iran's totally and completely obliterated nuclear program, she revises the claim.
oh, we just went that one time with B-52s on Operation Midnight Hammer to just set back their program.
And this is how history gets rewritten by liars who want war all the time for their own ideological or personal reasons or often both.
Here's the rest of what she says.
To suppress Iranian air defenses.
And so Iran is, in a sense, defenseless then.
And then you see that the Iranians are rebuilding their nuclear capability, that they're rearming Hamas and Hezbollah, and that they are essentially at this moment defenseless.
They won't always be defenseless.
And so the decision is to really at this point take care of it and render them incapable of those activities.
So I see it as a series of decisions.
I do think that big ones, but a bold, bold ones, Brett Bear.
Let's be careful.
These are bold decisions.
Brett Bear didn't want to let the noun decisions go without a very complimentary adjective.
Bold decisions.
Big ones, she hastens to add.
A worthy goal.
All right.
Now, if I were Condoleezza Rice, and thankfully I am not, I don't have to live the rest of my life knowing that I'm responsible for the death of more than a million people based on bringing a country to war that I sold to the American public by lying to them, that everything I said in selling that word was false.
But if I were Condoleezza Rice in a hypothetical, thankfully non-existent world, and I wanted to sell the Iran war, the one thing I would avoid saying is that Iran has a reconstituted nuclear program, that they're seeking and developing and returning to a path of nuclear weapons.
And that was because she was the person who most is associated with the lie that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
And she went on CNN in October of 2002 in a now infamous interview where she said this about why it was so important to go to war against the Iranian nuclear program, even though we didn't have definitive proof that they were actually pursuing one.
There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Basically telling the American people, if you don't let us go to this war, there's a good chance that your cities are going to be nuked and you're going to be evaporated, vaporized under a nuclear cloud.
Obviously, Saddam Hussein didn't have biological or chemical weapons, let alone nuclear weapons.
They weren't pursuing nuclear weapons.
There was no evidence that the U.S. found for any of that.
These were all lies.
So having said that, I guess her argument is, well, I thought it.
So I said it, okay, but everything about it was wrong with very grave consequences, not for just for the world, but also specifically mostly for the United States, the service member who died, the Iraqis who were perished, the more than a million Iraqis who died, the people we told said we were going in to save or liberate or whatever.
And all the other pitches were absolutely we're going to liberate the Iraqi people.
They were going to welcome us as liberators.
It would be a quick war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Wouldn't you avoid replicating the exact thing with which you're most associated when selling that other lie-driven war from 23 years ago that will certainly be prominently featured in any honest obituary when you die?
And yet there's no qualms about it.
Not from Fox, not from all of the warmongers who sold the Iraq war surrounding President Trump now advocating for the Iran war.
Not from Fox, not from anybody.
It's actually remarkable.
I would think they would just spend a little bit of time readjusting the script somewhat so it didn't sound exactly like what they said back then.
But they're not really even bothering.
All right.
Also, let me just make one point about that clip we just watched on Fox.
She's saying they're defenseless.
Who goes to war against a defenseless country?
If Iran is defenseless, how can they simultaneously pose a grave threat to the United States?
There's no war doctrine that says you can attack a country because they're defenseless.
But of course, that is what the United States does in its wars.
We don't, for example, ever mess with nuclear powers.
We would never go to war with China.
We don't dare even have anything to do with North Korea or Russia or China.
And we have sent the message to the world that if you're a rational country, there's only one thing you should be trying to think about, and that is getting nuclear weapons because we'll attack you if you're defenseless.
But if you have nuclear weapons, we won't.
But how is that claim, oh, they're defenseless, consistent with the claim that they're posing some grave threat that we have to go and attack them now?
It's the same thing like Pete Hegseth was saying yesterday.
Oh, we have total dominance four days into the world.
We destroyed their air force.
We destroyed their military navy.
We control the seas.
We control the air.
We control the whole country.
We determine their fate.
If you can destroy a country in four days, it's not very convincing that they are some sort of grave threat that justifies a preventative war against them.
These are totally inconsistent claims because the real claim that we did it for Israel is one that they can't admit.
So they're just constantly scurrying around trying to come up with false claims.
And in a way, I don't blame them for reaching for the script that they're very familiar with that they used before.
Let's listen to some more of Condoleezza Rice, who Fox was like, hmm, want to get a guess of the American Public Trust, American Public believes that this time this is a war that is based on true premises.
How about Condoleezza Rice?
That's in Foxland, how people reason, but it's not just Fox.
It's all over the place.
Here's more of what she said.
If you ask people about Iraq, what was the source of many of our casualties in Iraq?
You'll get estimates as high as 75 or 80% of them were due to Iranian-made roadside bombs.
And so they've been at war for us a long time.
They also have developed the military capability to have reach outside of the boundaries of Iran, including Hezbollah and Hamas, which they both arm and equip and continue to arm and equip.
Okay.
I just want you to, first of all, listen to what she's saying.
She's saying, I know I sold the country of the Iraq war.
It was a complete disaster.
You know why?
It wasn't because everything we said was going to happen didn't happen.
It wasn't because we didn't understand this country.
We were trying to change and transform and govern.
It wasn't because we lied for ideological reasons, because the people who were selling the war wanted a war with Iraq well before 9-11 and we used 9-11 as an excuse.
No, the reason everything went wrong in Iraq is not because of us, but because of Iran, which is more reason why we have to go attack them now, 23 years later.
I always found it unbelievable that when the United States was occupying Iraq after invading it by sending 150,000 troops to the other side of the world, the United States government used to frequently complain about interference in Iraq by Iran.
We invaded the country.
We were occupying it.
You don't get greater interference than that.
And we would say, oh, it's Iran interfering in Iraq.
Iran, the bordering country with all kinds of interests on their border, like Russia and Ukraine, with all kinds of Shiite factions and groups and people that the Iranians feel duty-bound to protect.
That's their part of the world.
We were saying, how can they interfere?
And it is true that Iran provided weapons to Iraqis who are fighting against Americans, just like we provide weapons to the Ukrainians and all over the world.
We provide weapons to people.
We obviously don't think that's a just cause for war.
But this claim, honestly, it's making me really sick, especially as I get more and more pervasive.
I keep hearing it more and more from more and more sources every day.
Oh, we didn't start a war with Iran six days ago when we went and attacked them and bombed them with Israel.
No, we didn't start the war.
This is just a war.
This is a war that Iran has been waging war on us, as Condo Isra said, for 47 years.
We've been in a war with Iran for 47 years.
Oh, okay.
So we've been in a war with Iran for 47 years.
But every American president over the last 47 years just forgot to wage the war.
Like Iran has been in a war with us and we've just been like, yeah.
And also, we've been in a war with Iran, an act of war for 47 years, but no American president or anyone running for office from either of the two major parties ever bothered to mention, hey, you know, we're at war with Iran and we haven't been doing enough.
We got to go and attack them and bomb them and annihilate their Navy.
You would think that would have been mentioned before about six seconds ago when Israel wanted us to go to war.
It's such a laughable claim.
If we were at war during the Bush administration, why didn't the Bush administration go to war with Iran?
Why didn't Obama in eight years?
Congress Votes on War00:05:47
Why didn't Trump in the first term?
He killed one Iranian general.
Why weren't Republicans pressuring Biden to go do it?
This claim that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years and you just none of you knew it.
Presidential campaigns didn't remember to mention it is such an insult to the public's intelligence that I'm actually even more amazed that they're trying that.
All right.
In case you are somebody too young to have lived through the Iraq war and these run-up to it, people have forgotten, I want to show you a speech that George W. Bush gave in October, on October 8th, in 2002 in Cincinnati.
What happened was the Congress is begging for the right to vote on the war.
And the position of Bush and Cheney was: we can start this war.
We don't need congressional approval.
And all the Democratic leaders went to the White House and begged and said, look, just let us.
We promise it's going to pass.
We're all going to vote for it.
We have like half the Democratic caucus in the Senate ready to vote for it, including the key senators like Joe Biden and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
They're all going to vote yes.
Just please let us.
And so they said, all right, if you promise, since you're promising you're going to vote yes, just let us.
So this was the lead up to that vote, which happened two weeks later.
And George Bush went to Cincinnati to basically summarize and finalize his case for going to war with Iraq.
They ended up going to invade Iraq and bomb Iraq with shock and ah about four or five months later, after the Congress voted, the Senate Congress voted yes.
And I just want you to listen to the first two minutes of George W. Bush's speech so you don't think I'm picking like the most worthy parts to advance the argument.
I just want you to hear in your own ears and remember the first two minutes of his speech about why we had to go to war with Iraq and you will instantly see how identical, not similar to, identical to it is from what the U.S. government and its media cheerleaders and the people they're pulling out like Conde Leezer Ice are telling you now.
It will always be.
All right.
I love that clip so much I almost showed it to you twice.
Here's one.
Here's George W. Bush.
You all.
Thank you for that very gracious and warm Cincinnati welcome.
I'm honored to be here tonight.
Appreciate you all coming.
Tonight I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace and America's determination to lead the world in confronting that threat.
The threat comes from Iraq.
It arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions, its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror.
11 years ago, As a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups.
The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations.
It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.
It is seeking nuclear weapons.
I mean, all of these are lies.
Those two last declarative statements, it possesses chemical and biological weapons.
It is seeking nuclear weapons.
Even the U.S. government, even the Bush administration, ended up admitting that those were false.
This is a remarkable moment in American history to watch this.
And you'll note that every claim is identical to the one being made now.
It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people.
The entire world has witnessed Iraq's 11-year history of defiance, deception, and bad faith.
We must also never forget the most vivid events of recent history.
On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability, even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth.
Obviously, 9-11 was constantly used, even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11.
And yet, in the later, in the speech, Bush went on to claim that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a very tight relationship, that Iraq gave harbor and refuge to al-Qaeda leaders trying to link Iraq to the 9-11 attacks, because he knew that Americans wouldn't support a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, which was about a year exactly to that day, a little bit more than a year, year and a month, because why would you go to war against a country that had nothing to do with the attack you had just suffered?
So they lied there too.
They have nuclear weapons or they're getting nuclear weapons.
They're well on their way to getting nuclear weapons.
They're going to give it to terrorists.
They're going to use it against us.
They support terrorist groups.
They have chemical and biological weapons.
This is a terrorist state.
it's exactly the same exactly the same as everything we've been hearing even complete with the claim that george w bush ended up making that saddle hussein tried to kill his dad he gave a speech like in a press conference he said well i know saddam's evil he tried to kill my dad and of course you saw all last year these obviously orchestrated leaks about how the iranians are trying to assassinate president trump nothing changes in this propaganda nothing And I should say that again,
it's not just the Iraq war.
War Propaganda Tactics00:02:39
That's where it's most vivid.
Same when it came time to demonize Gaddafi to go to war in Libya or Assad when it came time to go do Obama's dirty war in CIA dirty war in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, before that, Vietnam.
It's always the same.
People fall for it because war propaganda is very powerful.
Tribal emotions, nationalistic emotions, patriotic emotions are very potent.
That's what this is designed to play on, as well as fear above all, which, of course, fear is a very powerful human motivator instinctively.
It has to be.
It's how we've survived.
Now, I just want to show you one last clip, even though it's not directly relevant to the question of the Iran war.
This actually happened when Condoleezza Rice went on Fox News at the start or near the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
She was on with Harris Faulkner.
I just want you to listen to the conversation the two of them had about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.
I mean, I think we're at just a real basic, basic point there.
Well, I'd agree.
It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.
And that's why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also a part of it.
And I think the world is there.
Certainly NATO is there.
He's managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn't think I would ever see again after the end of the Cold War.
Well, Harris Faulkner said in my book, I mean, if you invade another country, that is a war crime.
And Condoleezza Rice sat there nodding and then explained all the punishments that Russia deserves for having invaded a foreign country right over the other border, not on the other side of the world.
How can you be a sentient human being?
By the way, Condoleezza Rice is very smart.
Harris Faulkner is not.
Condoleezza Rice is.
Harris Faulkner, I'm sure the neurons didn't connect.
She had no idea she was sitting talking to the architect of the Iraq war, calling her a war criminal, basically, by saying that anytime you invade a sovereign country, that's a war crime.
Condoleezza Rice understood completely.
But she's just such a brazen liar, a sociopath, really, that she just pretended that that had nothing to do with her or the United States, only Russia.
I think it's important to realize that the only people who can really just constantly lie and propagandize a country into a war are actual sociopaths.
They know what the consequences are.
They've seen it up close.
The blood is on their hands, but it doesn't bother them.
They look at it every day and it doesn't bother them.