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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18757 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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We often see complaints and questions about the Iran War in regards to what the US's victory conditions and objectives there even are supposed to be. Despite the inconsistency on many given reasons, the US has stayed pretty consistent on one reason, Iran was working towards nukes and we gotta stop them.

But was Iran actually working towards nukes at the time? The "Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent" (the guy who resigned in protest) has revealed that the intelligence community apparently believed otherwise.

One of the many tragedies of this war is that before the war began the U.S. Intel Community, including CIA, was in agreement that Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon & that Iran would target U.S. bases in the region & shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by Israel & the U.S.," Kent wrote in a post on Thursday.

So this begs the question, what is the real reason? Kent says Israel, and everything seems to be pointing towards that as the true cause. Bibi has been pushing hard towards this goal of attacking Iran for at least three admins considering he's given the same pitch to Obama.

And as I've pointed out before, even the US's own official explanations are heavily pointing towards Israel as their main focus.

Literally, they say it themselves in this press release.

As the United States has explained in multiple letters to the U.N. Security Council, including most recently on March 10, the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.

Mike Johnson has said it. and Rubio has said it. Lindsey Graham is blatant about it. This war is for Israel. Rubio and Mike Johnson later denied their own words, and mayve it's true they both made a mistake. Interesting that two high ranking officials apparently both made the same mistake in saying Israel brought us into the war, and this same mistake was then repeated in the official press releases.

And they say it's not just Israel, and sure maybe it's not the only thing, but it is strange that it's both their first listed reason and most of the release is focused specifically on Israel and Israeli interests. And Israel being listed first happens quite a bit here.

Third, Iran’s extensive, long-term support of Hizballah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Iran‑aligned militia groups in Iraq and Syria has enabled those terrorist organizations to carry out destabilizing attacks against Israel, the United States, Argentina, and others, including countries seeking to freely exercise transit rights through the Strait of Hormuz.

It's not in alphabetical order, so can't be that. Why is the focus quite consistently putting Israel before the US like this in the USG's own official justification press release?

So if we didn't actually get into this war over Iran building nukes, is there any other explanations actually left? That's the only thing the Admin seems to be actually consistent about, and it's apparently completely fabricated.

And the White House's response to Fox News about this seems to be really interesting in how they worded it. For example

"Joe Kent’s self-aggrandizing resignation letter and recent comments are riddled with lies. Most egregious are Kent’s false claims that the largest state sponsor of terrorism somehow did not pose a threat to the United States and that Israel forced the President into launching Operation Epic Fury.

You see, it didn't actually address what Kent said.

They took "Iran building nukes" and made it into "Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and could pose a threat to the US". They took "Israel was the main reason for the operation" and made it into "Israel forced the president". Why did they dodge it like this?

As Commander-in-Chief, President Trump took decisive action based on strong evidence which showed that the terrorist Iranian regime posed an imminent threat and was preparing to strike Americans first. President Trump’s number one priority has always been ensuring the safety and security of the American people."

Likewise again, this doesn't address the claims about US intelligence! In fact, this statement is also perfectly in line with the "Israel was going to attack Iran and Trump felt they had to also do strikes beforehand then because of retaliation" story given before. But at least it wasn't literally forced so that's good news, despite no one claiming that.

The direct impetus for the air strikes was obviously the Iranian protests and the slaughter of thousands of protestors weeks before. Having the government of Iran be replaced by protestors who owe the success of their revolution to U.S. airstrikes is presumably a best-case outcome for the U.S. (and for Iranians), but Trump has varied between explicitly calling for regime change and minimalist goals regarding further destroying their nuclear program, probably in large part so that he can declare victory regardless of how things turn out.

When the protests were still ongoing Trump was supposedly hours from ordering air strikes against Iranian police/etc. to support the protestors but was talked down, supposedly in part by Netanyahu fearing retaliation before Israel was prepared for it. There was a lot of talk at the time about how this was a betrayal of the protestors, who he urged to take over the institutions and implied U.S. support but then didn't deliver while they were slaughtered. Meanwhile U.S. assets were moved into the region to support a better-prepared attack. By the time U.S. assets were in place the protests had been suppressed but Trump went ahead with the attack anyway. Since the attack both Trump and Reza Pahlavi have been explicitly urging the protestors to wait and it is unclear if Trump believes revolution is now futile, if he wants to do more work to weaken the regime before calling for protests to resume, or if he wants to keep his options open between some sort of agreement and attempting regime change.

These protestors were armed by the US and Israel. It was an armed insurrection backed by an enemy state. Iran had every reason to shut if down and it is far better to shut it down than turn into Syria. The casualty numbers are sold to us by the same people who lied about every other regime change war.

Those protestors were not armed by the US, Israel, or anyone else.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/6/has-trump-confirmed-irans-claim-that-protesters-were-us-armed

Mossad and CIA have been backing all sorts of groups to create chaos in Iran.

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