On February 28, 2026, President Donald J. Trump—in collusion with Israel—launched massive airstrikes against Iran. 

Since then, he—and other members of his administration—have issued a series of shifting and contradictory reasons for starting the war. Among them:

• Preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. 
• Destroying Iran’s missile capabilities.
• Annihilating the Iranian navy.
• Ensuring that Iran quit arming, funding and/or directing “terrorist armies” outside its borders.
• Pre-empting an Iranian attack on American military bases in the Middle East.

One reason not given: Driving the Epstein files—which document Trump’s salacious relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—off the airways and Internet.

Equally worrisome has been Trump’s shifting estimates about how long the conflict will rage:

• March 9: “It’s going to be ended soon.” 
• March 11: “Any time I want it to end, it will end.”   
• March 13: “It’ll be as long as it’s necessary.”  
• March 13: “When I feel it in my bones” when asked “When are you going to know when it’s over?” 

Trump’s comments are eerily similar to those made by President George W. Bush on May 1, 2003.

Standing under a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush announced: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Only on December 18, 2011, were American forces withdrawn from Iraq.

But Americans, refusing to learn from history or even read it, are now being forced to repeat it.

To begin at the beginning: 

Even as the rubble was being cleared at the Pentagon and World Trade Center from 9/11, President George W. Bush was preparing to use the attack as an excuse to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

World Trade Center on September 11, 2001

Hussein had not plotted 9/11, and there was no evidence that he did. But that didn’t matter to Bush and those planning the invasion and conquest of Iraq.

British historian Nigel Hamilton has dared to lay bare the facts of this disgrace. Hamilton is the author of several acclaimed political biographies, including JFK: Reckless Youth and Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency.

In 2007, he began research on his latest book: American Caesars: The Lives of the Presidents From Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

The inspiration for this came from a classic work of ancient biography: The Twelve Caesars, by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus—known as Suetonius.

Suetonius, a Roman citizen and historian, had chronicled the lives of the first twelve Caesars of imperial Rome: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.

Hamilton wanted to examine post-World War II United States history as Suetonius had examined that of ancient Rome: Through the lives of the 12 “emperors” who had held the power of life and death over their fellow citizens—and those of other nations.

For Hamilton, the “greatest of American emperors, the Caesar Augustus of his time,” was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led his country through the Great Depression and World War II.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

His “”great successors” were Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—who, in turn, contained the Soviet Union abroad and presided over sustained economic prosperity at home.

By contrast, “arguably the worst of all the American Caesars” was “George W. Bush, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, who willfully and recklessly destroyed so much of the moral basis of American leadership in the modern world.”

Among the most lethal of Bush’s offenses: The appointing of officials who refused to take seriously the threat posed by Al-Qaeda.

And this arrogance and indifference continued—right up to September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and Pentagon became targets for destruction.

Among the few administration officials who did take Al-Qaeda seriously was Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council.

Clarke had been thus appointed in 1998 by President Bill Clinton. He continued in the same role under  President Bush—but the position was no longer given cabinet-level access.

This put him at a severe disadvantage when dealing with other, higher-ranking Bush officials—such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.

These turned out to be the very officials who refused to believe that Al-Qaeda posed a lethal threat to the United States.

“Indeed,” writes Hamilton, “in the entire first eight months of the Bush Presidency, Clarke was not permitted to brief President Bush a single time, despite mounting evidence of plans for a new al-Qaeda outrage.”  [Italics added]

Nor did it help that, during his first eight months in office before September 11, Bush was on vacation, according to the Washington Post, 42% of the time. 

For months, Clarke tried to convince others in the Bush Administration that Bin Laden was plotting another attack against the United States–either abroad or at home.

But Clarke could not prevail against the know-it-all arrogance of such higher-ranking Bush officials as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice.