Trump and Netanyahu don't want you to see the true reasons for their attack on Iran

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is premised on a gossamer web of assumptions and inferences.

Trump says Iran has enough nuclear material to build a bomb within days, will soon have long-range missiles capable of hitting the United States, and plans an attack. But he has offered no evidence. Most experts say he’s wrong.

Here’s the real reason for this war. Trump wants it to divert Americans’ attention from everything that’s gone to s--- on his watch: the economy, ICE’s cruel raids and murders, the crisis in public health as exemplified by the measles epidemic, our loss of friends and allies around the world, his boundless corruption, and his increasing unpopularity as shown in plummeting polls.

Oh, and there are the Epstein files, rapidly closing in on the man whose history of sexual assaults and braggadocio make his complicity highly likely.

Netanyahu is also using this war as a giant diversion. He doesn’t want the world to dwell on the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.

As former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote recently, “A violent and criminal effort is under way to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank. Gangs of armed settlers persecute, harm, wound and even kill Palestinians living there.”

Like Trump, Netanyahu has been trampling constitutional rights — seeking a judicial coup to eliminate the separation of powers, purging Israel’s independent attorney general of his powers, trying to dismiss his own corruption trial, and politicizing appointments to what had been a neutral civil service.

Trump and Netanyahu are using the same authoritarian playbook.

A big part of that playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.

We mustn’t let this war do so.

I finally watched a tape of Trump’s State of the Union address (I couldn’t bring myself to watch it at the time). It was even more horrendous than I’d imagined.

What stood out for me was all the important problems Trump didn’t mention, as if they didn’t exist. Climate change. Widening inequality. Monopolies driving up prices. Declining real incomes. The growing scourges of poverty — homelessness, hunger, disease, and violence — in America and around the world. Unregulated AI.

If and when he ever mentions them, he calls them “hoaxes.”

Instead, he’s worsened all of them — helping fossil fuels while killing off wind and solar, eviscerating antitrust enforcement and letting monopolies consume entire industries, giving the rich more tax cuts while cutting back Medicaid and food stamps, destroying USAID and discouraging lifesaving vaccines while letting measles run rampant.

And he’s trying to divert attention to fake problems: non-Americans voting in elections (they don’t), Greenland and Venezuela (they pose no threat), “disloyal” Americans who criticize him or judges who try to hold him accountable (thank goodness they’re still trying).

And now, the biggest diversion of all: full-scale war in the Middle East.

Hopefully, the casualties will be limited. Hopefully, Americans will see through this. Hopefully, this will strengthen the resistance to Trump. Hopefully, it will lead to an even greater landslide victory for Democrats and independents in the midterm elections — if Trump allows midterm elections.

Please remain hopeful. Don’t give in to war fever. Stay strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org