Psychopolitical Review

The post-9/11 US ‘war on terror’, according to a Brown University study, resulted in 4.5 million deaths. For the aggressor, both its ethical and human cost is reflected in the number of US servicemen dying by suicide this century––four times that of combat casualties. Costing $8 trillion, the war collapsed the institutions of target nations and left them vulnerable to violent, puratanical actors. 

The US––the world’s largest weapons dealer and oil producer––is aided in its doctrinal regime changes by its 750 foreign military bases. The ally hosting the most number of such bases, Japan, includes in its history the US dropping an atomic bomb on its civilian population and, after observing the generational devastation, doing it again three days later.

Japan has been a close US ally ever since. That all of West Asia is not a Japanese story ruffles the influential US neoconservative (or neocon) lobby, which charted the ‘war on terror’ prior to terror, in the 1996 Operation Clean Break report––a recommendation for Israel-US to remodel West Asia. 

America has consistently sought refuge from such indicting facts with a moral posturing inverse to its track record.

Its interventions have required tending to citizen psychology on an equal magnitude. The cycle of conflict, regime change, military expansion and occupation––through successive postwar governments––has left a trail of state propaganda so vast that presidential candidates clamour to swear greater fealty to it. This political culture, exemplified by the neoconservatives, tries to maintain a permanent alienation between US citizens and the catastrophic effects of their foreign policy.    

Prior to 9/11, America already had a history of deadly and expansionist forays across West Asia. In addition, it had absorbed regional actors into its structural print and rooted out the outliers, ensuring pliancy and obscuring anti-American narratives. Channeling American exceptionalism and then a brute avoidance of culpability proved disastrous: institutionally erasing the discourse merely allowed it to be revived and repackaged in the hands of terrorists.      

Neoconservative leader and then president George W. Bush, giving reasons for the 9/11 attacks, did not speculate about any of that, instead deploying audacious propaganda effective to this day: ‘They hate our freedoms.’ America, according to Bush, reflected everything that conservative foreign societies and their extremists hate––to where they, at risk of an annihilating US response, will attack for that reason alone. This propaganda, deployed at the top level, assumed many forms once it percolated to the ground. 

As recently as during the Israeli and US attacks on Iran––22 years later––mutated variants of Bush’s propaganda find space in popular US programming. Iranian public realities are contrasted with lionised American ideals: the freedom to not wear a headscarf, the freedom to wear skirts, the freedom of speech, pursuit of individual liberties including those pertaining to sexual preference and gender. The narrative is that Muslim hardliners with nuclear ambitions have evil designs on the US because they cannot bear to witness the unfolding of an advanced society.

Bush’s messaging has endured for decades, harnessed to provide, in 2025, motivations to attack Iran. The set of shifting reasons offered for the attack include the idea that Iran simply hates everything the US stands. It stresses the Islamic government’s internal—apparently ideologically intolerable—repressions and unpopularity. To use neoconservative language, to ‘take out’ a government over alleged unpopularity is insincere when coming from the US, where roughly 70 million people have voted for the defeated candidate in each of the last three elections.  

As seen with Iran, the allegation of hating American freedoms serves aggression as well––proving to serve not just as an explanation for the US suffering aggression, but also a reason to carry it out without provocation.

However, there is a workaround. Bush’s messaging needs a single adjustment to become truthful. To replace the domestic freedoms he referred to with the geopolitical freedoms the US enjoys in reality would make his statement legitimate.

Within international law mandated by the UN charter, of which the US has positioned itself as the muscle and guarantor, American and Israeli military forays––brief, extended or permanent––are in innumerable instances illegal. The true and ‘blowback’-causing American freedoms are technically criminal freedoms. The freedom to hang presidents only rests with the US. The freedom to violently abolish foreign political cultures, often against the will of its own allies and to visible commercial benefit, is the deadly exceptionalism the US practices in reality.

Regional populations overwhelmingly hate these freedoms. If mass casualties and engineered coups are exempted from institutional repercussions, those facts will not perish but instead find accommodation in violent, sectarian actors. Some of these actors have sprung directly from American prisons in Iraq, where Bush’s intervention caused a million deaths over a lie.       

The root of current US-Iran tensions lies in the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected president Mohammad Mosaddegh, followed by the installation of a monarchical police state. This enabled the removal of Mossadeq’s oil reforms. In other words, tensions began with, as always and without exception, the American freedom to tamper with nations.

These freedoms should now curtail. The neconservative doctrine has proved disastrous. However, the recent 30,000 pound bombing of a nuclear facility proves that it is still influential. If American adventurism is to be relegated to a berserker past, the neoconservative lobby needs an immediate counterweight.

How it is cobbled together is secondary, as long as it can normalise within American politics one radical idea: the loss of excess revenue for defence and oil firms is self-evidently more acceptable—than bombing the disobedient.