The Road to War Is Paved With Lies

Every war begins with a story meant to justify it. The story now being told about Iran is built on the same familiar foundation of fear, deception, and political convenience.

“The Whole Damn Thing Was A Lie.”

That message was used during the Vietnam War, both on the battlefields with soldiers and at home with our war protests. Vietnam shaped my life as a young man and has shaped my response to war ever since.

The only thing true about war is that lies are always needed to justify it. We have seen it again and again throughout history. The attack on Iran is no exception. Donald Trump and his entire administration are lying about the Iran war, and so are the Republicans who support them. Their deceptions and fabrications consistently contradict one another on a daily and sometimes hourly basis because they are not grounded in truth. When statements are built on lies, they eventually end up collapsing under their own weight. This is evident right now as Donald Trump and his Republican allies can’t seem to keep their lies straight.

Iran was not and is not “an imminent threat” to the people of the United States. That claim is a lie. It could become true in the distant future if Iran possessed ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. and nuclear weapons to put on them. But that is not the situation today, and even Donald Trump has acknowledged that reality.

Iran does have missiles that can reach countries in the Middle East, and has launched them at a number of these, including Israel. But these attacks occurred only after the U.S. and Israel, in coordination with each other, attacked Iran first.

What is rarely taken into account in war is the civilian casualties. They are often written off as “collateral damage” by those fighting the war. Refusing to acknowledge all the innocent civilians killed in war is a sin, just like the lies used to justify the fighting in the first place. War always raises moral questions, and these questions must be faced with honesty.

Reports from Iranian authorities and international rights groups indicate that at least 1,230 Iranian civilians have been killed in the Iran War. One hundred seventy-five of them were young girls and staff at an elementary school in Minad who were killed on the first day of the war.

It is particularly offensive to me, the way Trump drops thousands of bombs on Iran and then tells the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. There is no plan for that statement, no strategy, and no support from the United States. To claim that Donald Trump cares for either the Iranian people or American soldiers is simply not credible because he is putting no effort into protecting either.

So far, six American soldiers have been killed in the Iran War, and the President predicts more fatalities to come. Yet even the reporting of these deaths has become political. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized news outlets for highlighting the deaths of U.S. service members, claiming the coverage was unfair because “the press only wants to make the president look bad.”

Donald Trump cares only about himself, his power, his wealth, and his ego. Beyond his lies about the war and the constant shifting of his explanations for it, he has also demonstrated profound incompetence as the President of the United States. His ability to lie, along with his complete disregard for human life and utter incompetence create a formula for spiraling death and destruction. That is the path we are on now.

I recently had the opportunity to record a podcast conversation with Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian Christian lawyer and director of Friends of Sabeel North America. Jonathan has practiced international and human rights law for decades. We spoke about the more than two years of devastating war in Gaza, the new conflict with Iran, and the ways U.S. policy has become entangled with the political and business interests surrounding the Kushner, Witkoff, and Trump networks.

Jonathan warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza shattered decades of international legal norms, as he put it, “Gaza broke all these rules,” opening the door to a world where the restraints of international law no longer hold, and global impunity becomes more likely.

Our conversation turned to the question of nonviolence. He and I had a long conversation about nonviolence and how it really can be stronger than violence. I suggested that diplomacy is clearly better than war, but diplomacy often means little more than talking. Nonviolence requires action. It requires concrete steps that actually build peace. It leads to direct action, economic boycotts, legal accountability for violence, truthful communication up against falsehood to change narratives, and the courage to take risks. As we spoke, I recalled the words of Daniel Berrigan, who said that genuine peacemaking is as costly and demanding as war, requiring the sacrifice of comfort and even freedom. Thinking about that made me reflect on someone who lived those convictions for decades.

Ironically, and perhaps prophetically, a longtime columnist for the Washington Post, Colman McCarthy, died on Saturday, the same day the war in Iran began. After training to be a monk, McCarthy left the monastery and entered journalism, where he became a strong and consistent voice for peace. He once said, “If we don’t teach our children peace,” Colman argued, “somebody else will teach them violence.” He lived by those words and devoted himself to teaching. Over the years, he taught middle, high school, and college students throughout the Washington D.C. area, including Georgetown, reaching more than 30,000 young people with lessons about peace and the strength of nonviolence.

Colman’s obituary is a must-read, and I strongly encourage all to go read it. Although it recounts the life of a man who just passed, it was the most timely thing I have read since the beginning of the war in Iran. It offers a sense of what Colman McCarthy might have said himself if he were witnessing this moment with us.

McCarthy was often called the “liberal conscience” of the Washington Post. He wrote about war and peace, homelessness, and social justice, and he consistently spoke out against violence wherever and however it appeared. Colman lived right around the corner from my family, and he always approached all issues he wrote about with a depth that many others lack.

“What should be the moral purpose of writing if not to embrace ideals that can help fulfill the one possibility we all yearn for, the peaceable society?” McCarthy asked in his farewell column in 1996. “Peace is the result of love, and if love were easy, we’d all be good at it.”

He spoke just as bluntly years later. “We say we love peace and democracy, but we are delusional, kidding ourselves,” he told the Post columnist Courtland Milloy in 2020. “We are the world’s leading purveyor of violence, as Martin Luther King noted back in 1967. And it’s still true today. We have a violent government and endless wars. On the dollar bill, we put ‘In God We Trust.’ But that is a lie. It ought to read, ‘In Bombs We Trust.’”

The obituary also noted the discipline that shaped McCarthy’s life. “McCarthy was a steadfast opponent of the death penalty and, to the consternation of allies on the left, abortion. He remained seated for the national anthem, which he considered “a war song.” This discipline expanded from his politics to his personal life, where he would ride his bicycle to work, commuting ten miles each day on a Raleigh three-speed that he considered as sturdy as a Clydesdale horse. Joy and I often saw him riding his bike through the neighborhood, and he always stopped to talk.

Remembering a life like Colman McCarthy’s reminds me that the moral response to war must go deeper than criticism of political leaders. This horrible war in Iran, with consequences that will only be more devastating as the war continues, must lead us to more than criticism of Donald Trump. It should lead us to a deeper examination of the power of nonviolence and the moral imperative for all of us to take action to bring peace.

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