Dear Mother Jones Reader,
I’m back in your inbox today both to share some key thoughts about what’s going on with the war in Iran and to pester you.
My colleagues on the fundraising team have leaned on me to ask you a question: Can you help us? Today is the final day of our $50,000 match that’s been going on all week. (They told me to use boldface to emphasize that!) It’s a big deal for us. Any gift you make today will be doubled because of a generous matching gift from someone who loves what we at Mother Jones do.
That means your support of our newsroom will be doubled. If you can send us $10, $50, $100—feel free to go higher—my reporting team will receive twice that. And that will help us to continue to expose the lies and authoritarian measures that are now buttressing an illegal overseas war and threatening American democracy.
Let me tell you what I’m hoping for besides a big response to this email—that someone is keeping a list of everything that ought to be investigated should the Democrats win back either house of Congress in November. It’s one helluva spreadsheet—from Donald Trump’s crypto business to the deadly abuses of ICE to the tragic decimation of USAID to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s lies-fueled war on science. But Trump’s war in Iran deserves its own column.
This war of choice—launched without consultation with (or the assent of) Congress or Washington’s allies—appears to have been poorly conceived and haphazardly planned, especially regarding what to do after the bombing. Strait of Hormuz? Who could have imagined that might be a problem?
Following George W. Bush’s Iraq War, the Senate intelligence committee did two comprehensive reports, one on the pre-war intelligence screw-up, the other examining the misrepresentation of the intelligence by the Bush-Cheney crew. That’s a good precedent. Though the war and the global chaos Trump has wrought is not done, there already are obvious subjects that warrant digging into.
Perhaps the most salient topic worth probing is why Trump launched this war. He and his aides have offered multiple reasons. The nuclear talks had failed. Israel was going to attack, and the United States needed to hit Iran before it could retaliate at American targets. There was an opportunity for regime change. At one point, Trump said Iran was two weeks away from a nuclear bomb. (That was a big lie.) Well, what was the reason?
Three weeks in, it’s still hard to get an explanation for this war or a coherent statement on its aims and the endgame. A week ago, I wrote in my Our Land newsletter about how Trump’s war has been marked by callousness and idiocy. Alas, those themes are perennials. Every day, we see misleading, reckless, and, yes, dumb remarks about the war coming from Trump and his lackeys.
Back to the pitch: Our team here at Mother Jones calls it like it is. We don’t shy away from reporting the full and unvarnished truth. We’re here to hold the administration and its allies accountable for the dangerous chaos and conflict they create. Trump calls this sort of journalism “unpatriotic.” We call it essential for the preservation of democracy.
We thrive and produce the kick-ass journalism you depend on because we’re an independent, nonprofit newsroom. We have no oligarch owner or big corporation to answer to. We’re funded by our readers. “Someone like me?” you ask. Precisely. It is only because of people like you—people who give a damn about the future of this country and who realize that without fierce independent media we’re screwed—that we can publish and post the scoops and investigative bombshells that reveal what’s going on and what’s at stake.
