This War's Lies Are Different—And More Dangerous

Trump teaches our country that truth doesn't matter. Hatred does.

“Truth is the first casualty of war,” they say. An old line, but it hasn’t lost its edge.

It is both ancient and accurate. Aeschylus knew it, and every press officer in every war today knows it.

But there are lies and there are lies, and this war’s lies are telling us something awful about where we are as a nation.

So, this is what a traditional wartime lie looks like:

On Tuesday The New York Times published a story by Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan reporting that U.S. intelligence assessments dated to early this month find that Iran remains much stronger militarily than we are being told by our leaders. Citing “classified assessments” by US intelligence agencies, the Times reported that the regime retains roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile; that it has restored operational access to thirty of its thirty-three missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz; and that ninety percent of its underground missile facilities are now assessed as partially or fully operational.

That ain’t what we’ve been told.

It is sharply at odds with what the President and the Defense Secretary have been telling the country since the war began on February 28.

Trump told CBS News on March 9 that Iran’s “missiles are down to a scatter” and the country had “nothing left in a military sense.” Hegseth, on April 8 at the Pentagon, declared Operation Epic Fury had “decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come.”

Trump’s response to the Times story was characteristic: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON.”

We know this lie. It has a long American genealogy.

The Gulf of Tonkin. The manipulated body counts of General William Westmoreland and MACV. The aluminum tubes and the yellowcake in Iraq.

In each case, an American administration overstated a military reality in the service of a political need, and in each case—eventually—the press caught it, the public understood it, and the lie entered the historical ledger as a count against the liars. The credibility gap hurt the liars because credibility still mattered.

Daniel Ellsberg risked everything to leak the Pentagon Papers because he understood that in America at that time the truth he carried still had purchasing power.

Joe Wilson wrote his op-ed exposing the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger because he believed the Times op-ed page was a venue where a fact, plainly stated, could move the country.

This is the inheritance. And, to some degree, it still works. The Times story will be read. The intelligence is what it is. Iran’s missiles are where they are, or are not. The Strait remains, as a practical matter, closed. The administration’s claims can be checked. The press is checking them.

This is the new, terrible self-deception.

On the morning of February 28, in the opening hour of the war, an American Tomahawk cruise missile—possibly more than one—struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, a town in Hormozgan province on the Strait of Hormuz.

The school sat near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval compound. The school had once been part of that compound; a wall had been built between them sometime between 2013 and 2016.

American targeting data, by every credible reconstruction since, appears not to have been updated to reflect that wall. The principal of the school, after the first strike, moved a group of surviving children into a prayer room and began calling parents. A second strike hit the prayer room. According to the Iranian Ministry of Education and the mayor of Minab, there was a third strike after that.

One hundred and fifty-six people were killed.

One hundred and twenty of them were children. Most of the dead were girls between the ages of seven and twelve.

That was eleven weeks ago.

You have not heard their names. Neither have I. We could learn them. The information is available. Amnesty International has documented the strike. The UN Human Rights Office has condemned it.

CBS, NPR, PBS, the BBC, Al Jazeera have all independently confirmed the munition was American and the responsibility almost certainly ours. Wes Bryant, a retired Air Force master sergeant who spent two decades calling in airstrikes and worked in the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center until the Trump administration shrank it, identified the weapon and the targeting pattern within days.

The administration’s response has been to say it is “investigating” and that “no nation in the world takes greater care to avoid civilian casualties than the U.S.” The results of that investigation are apparently months away.

The President, on Air Force One, blamed Iran.

The schoolgirls of Minab are not a contested fact.

They are a known fact, sitting in plain view of any American who wishes to look. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not wish to look.

This is the lie that I cannot get past. Not the President’s lie—his is the old lie, dressed in new vulgarity. The other one. The lie of a public that has considered the option of caring whether one hundred and twenty children were killed by weapons paid for in our name, and declined the option. Not refused. Declined.

That is not the fault of the high-speed, dizzying, spinning news cycle, or of some “post-truth” social-media miasma that has turned the so-called “information age” into a blizzard of crazy shit.

The Times can still report. The bodies can still be counted. Wes Bryant can still identify the missile.

The wall between the school and the base was built when it was built, and the satellite images show what they show. What has changed is not the availability of truth. It is the disposition to want it.

The habits of real citizenship are dying in America.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who is not much read now and probably should be, made a very useful observation. Political reason, Oakeshott argued, is not a mental faculty that you switch on when you need it. It is a practice. It is sustained by habits of attention, by ways of being and thinking in a democracy that dispose us toward conversation and second thoughts, toward reflection and empathy.

The civic disposition to ask what actually happened before whose side are you on is not natural to us. It must be cultivated. It must be carried by institutions—by schools, churches, newspapers, families, by the unspoken expectation among neighbors that we all have to do the hard work of discerning what is true from what is a lie because that is what citizens in a free republic do.

This isn’t some liberal or conservative belief or doctrine. It is a set of small-d democratic practices, a way of going on together.

Donald Trump’s most consequential act has been to take a wrecking ball to all that.

His florid, flagrant, constant lies operate as a permission slip he has handed to a substantial portion of the country to stop conducting themselves as inquirers. He lies, and loves it, and it is intoxicating for millions of Americans who now live inside his id and are relieved of the moral exertion of citizenship.

That relief is his gift to them. A great many people are grateful for it.

What have we become? Who are we any more?

That is the Oakeshottian question. It is harder than the question of what is true, because lies can be exposed. But the civic desire to want them exposed cannot be legislated back into existence. It has to be lived back.

There is no shortcut. There is only the long, slow, ordinary, almost invisible work of citizens insisting, against the grain of an era, on the practice of inquiry.

The names of the children of Minab would be a place to start.

—Terry