Trump Is the Real Victim of Gaza and the Iran War?
AUG 11, 2026
Caught this headline at the New York Times this morning (8/11):
Top News
Trump Wants to Move On From the Middle East. It’s Not Letting Him.
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Poor Donald Trump! He “wants to move on” from his violent illicit affair with Iran and the Middle East, but his mistress won’t let him. He just has to keep pummeling Iran until she sees sense and lets him go.
The mainstream media always presents war as something inflicted on U.S. presidents, a weighty burden over which they have no control, their iron cross to bear. It’s ludicrous and loathsome.
It reminded me of what Mary McCarthy said about the American press during the Vietnam War—the way that war was framed as a burden LBJ had to carry and for which he should earn our sympathy. Disgusting, right?
Back in 2009, I wrote about that for TomDispatch; here’s an excerpt.
Even now, we speak too often of “Bush’s war” or, more recently, “Obama’s war.” Before we start chattering mindlessly about Iraq and Afghanistan as American tragedies, we would do well to recall what McCarthy had to say about the war in Vietnam: “There is something distasteful,” she wrote, “in the very notion of approaching [Vietnam] as an American tragedy, whose protagonist is a great suffering Texan [President Lyndon Baines Johnson].”
Yes, there is something distasteful about a media that blithely refers to Bush’s or Obama’s war as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans suffer. For American troops, after all, are not the only ones paying the ultimate price when the U.S. fights foreign wars for ill-considered reasons and misguided goals.
If only U.S. presidents like LBJ and Trump could do something to stop these terrible wars! They want to move on, they want peace, but Southeast Asia or the Middle East or some other foreign region just won’t let them.
Right … What U.S. presidents really learn is that it’s far far easier to start wars than to end them, that other peoples have a say as well, and that imposing one’s will (nice euphemism for bombing Iran and facilitating genocide in Gaza) is difficult because other countries and peoples do object to being bombed and murdered.
P.S. Note how Gaza is framed as a “conflict.” Note the conceit that Trump is actually trying to impose his will there to end the “conflict,” even as Zionist Israel pursues a genocide and land grab there with total support from Trump.
Bracing Views 
The “it’s all about us” idea was expressed by Golda Meir who lamented that while it was awful that Palestinians were killing Israeli children (members of the IDF), it was even worse that they were forcing Israelis to kill Palestinian children.
This self-righteousness goes along with the employment of power. I’d say “support our troops” is part of it. How could our troops be doing anything wrong?
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