Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), discusses the propaganda infrastructure that has been built over decades to manufacture public consent for the U.S. bombing of Iran. He outlines a coordinated network of Israeli and Saudi-backed media outlets, Washington think tanks (like the Washington Institute for Near East Peace and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), and AIPAC-aligned lobbying groups that have systematically worked to present war as “liberation”—including running influence operations targeting the Iranian diaspora to create the false impression of broad Iranian support for regime change via military force.

Abdi details how Israeli intelligence was caught running bot farms and troll networks to boost the profile of Reza Pahlavi (the deposed Shah’s son) as a puppet figurehead, and how Iranian-Americans who oppose the war have faced coordinated intimidation, threats, and silencing campaigns.

He also addresses the political dynamics inside the U.S., noting that only around 25% of the American public supports the war, that the Senate’s War Powers vote fell largely along party lines, and that the conflict is already showing signs of destabilization just days in — with CIA-backed ethnic separatists reportedly being armed and reports of covert operations designed to foment civil war rather than achieve any clean military objective. He draws parallels to the Iraq War propaganda playbook while warning that this conflict may unravel faster, and calls on ordinary people and advocacy organizations to pressure lawmakers before the situation becomes irreversible.

Read Abdi’s piece “Inside the Iran War Industry” for The Nation here.