The Times “Covers” the Iran War
Here’s The New York Times describing recent developments in the US-Israeli war against Iran and Lebanon:

The June memorandum of understanding was widely seen as a boon for Iran, granting the regime badly needed sanctions relief even as talks over tough concessions like nuclear enrichment were postponed for later. But Iranian leaders opted to escalate again rather than consolidate their gains from the deal, according to Nate Swanson, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group.

Ships could move through the Strait of Hormuz freely before the war. Iran’s insistence that the deal’s vague language on the issue gave it control over the waterway led to the deal falling apart. Iran began firing on ships that transited in channels outside Iranian waters, and American forces retaliated by bombing southern Iran, prompting a cycle of attacks and counterattacks across the Middle East.

In other words, according to the Times, “expert” opinion tells us that the failure of the ceasefire is to be chalked up to Iranian belligerence and irrationality. In fact, what it actually tells us is that the “experts” are full of shit. Every claim made in this passage is factually challenged nonsense. 

Paragraph 1 of the June 17, 2026 Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran explicitly calls on the United States and “its allies” to end all hostilities in Lebanon:

1. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final Deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph. 

The “allies” in question include Israel. Though Israel is not a signatory to the MoU, the United States is, and is therefore responsible for the actions of its “allies.” If Israel is in breach, the United States is, whether or not Israel regards itself as bound by the MoU.

And Israel is in breach. Israel didn’t just fail immediately and permanently to terminate “military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” but unleashed what The Financial Times calls “a campaign to make southern Lebanon ‘unliveable,’” in effect repeating in southern Lebanon what it had done in Gaza. Here’s a brief excerpt from that article in the FT, itself one article from a larger tranche of articles on the subject:

An [sic] FT visual investigation with journalism non-profit Lighthouse Reports found systematic destruction across Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, including tens of thousands of homes, schools, farmland and forests. Analysis of satellite imagery, open-source data and verified footage shows that much of the damage occurred after Israeli forces established control over emptied villages in mid-April. It has rendered large areas uninhabitable, destroying systems needed for civilian life, from water and energy infrastructure to medical care, a tactic rights groups and legal experts say appears designed to prevent residents’ return. “It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon,” said Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at rights group Amnesty International. “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon.”

Here, for comparison’s sake, is The New York Times’s coverage of the same issue: “In the months since Hezbollah attacked Israel in early March in solidarity with Iran, entire areas across southern Lebanon have emptied as the Israeli military has issued evacuation warnings, occupied dozens of towns and villages and reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble.” All true enough but for a fact that goes unmentioned: Hezbollah’s solidarity for Iran was induced by Israel’s having attacked Iran, making its expression a form of self-defense.

But even The New York Times has managed to get Israel’s underlying policy right: “Israel’s Message to a Broad Swath of Lebanon: Shiites Must Go,” we’re told (New York Times, April 1, 2026). The article tells us that the Israelis have advised the Druze and the Christians of southern Lebanon to drive their Shiite neighbors out of the country–into the sea?–at Israeli behest.

Over the past two weeks, Israeli military officials have called leaders of at least eight villages and told them to expel Shiites who had sought refuge in their communities, municipal officials and local Christian, Druse and Shiite leaders said in interviews. All complied, fearing that if they did not their towns could be hit next in the Israeli bombardment, they said. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive, private conversations.

The ethnic cleansing involved has been too big, too obvious, and too openly sectarian even for the NYT to miss. (See The New Yorker, Le Monde, Reuters, and Human Rights Watch for more).

Aftermath of an Israeli airstrike, Bachoura, Beirut, March 18, 2026 (photocredit: Megaphone, care of Wikimedia)

Israel’s continued ethnic cleansing of Lebanon after the MoU put the United States in breach of the MoU. The United States did absolutely nothing to rectify the breach. The very idea of sanctions against Israel is, after all, considered anti-Semitic, both in the United States and in Europe: American politicians go out of their way to brag about the “unconditional” nature of their support for Israel. As recent posts here have made clear, the United States has continued to ship weapons to Israel throughout this period (see this and this). The shipments involve agreements that long preceded the MoU, and in the absence of sanctions, Israel’s violations of the MoU have no bearing on them. Israel gets the American weapons unconditionally, no matter what it does or doesn’t do. (The website for A New Policy keeps an ongoing tally of Israel-pertinent legislation, including aid and weapons shipments.)

Iran explicitly invoked Israel’s operations in Lebanon as the basis for its non-compliance with the MoU. Here’s a headline from a June 26, 2026 article in Axios:

Is that big enough, or would a bigger font size help? The fine print: “The Iranian armed forces announced Saturday they will close the Strait of Hormuz — just three days after it reopened — alleging America’s failure to rein in Israeli attacks on Lebanon violates the new ceasefire deal.” The NYT somehow missed this. So, I guess, did its “Iran expert.”

There’s little that “Nate Swanson, Iran expert at the Atlantic Council” can say to rebut the preceding facts. It doesn’t matter how much “expertise” he has, or thinks he has, or the Times thinks he has. There is no way to get around the following facts: The MoU demanded a cessation of Israeli attacks in Lebanon. Israel set out to destroy Lebanon despite the MoU, and drive out its population. That breach by Israel (and by implication by the United States) nullified any justification for Iranian adherence to the MoU. So Iran stopped adhering. Contrary to the Times, Iran’s resort to force had nothing to do with “opting to escalate rather than consolidate their gains from the deal.” The deal was off, and was undermined by Israel. So there was no deal, and no gains to consolidate from it. 

What the NYT is serving up here is not “news,” or even “news analysis,” but crude propaganda masquerading as expert testimony. The Times and its experts are not reporting facts, but churning out factoids from a parallel universe that they’ve constructed out of their imaginations. The actual facts have simply been omitted, leaving readers with misinformation, muddle, and unresolved mystery. They can’t fail to know this. The result has to be the point.  

The NYT’s propaganda, like all mainstream American propaganda, depends for its efficacy on three highly reliable things: ignorance, amnesia, and indifference.

Because the Times’s reporting is tailored to filter out pertinent facts, it’s likely that its readership simply doesn’t know the basics, largely because the Times has made sure not to tell them.

Because the Times spends its time suppressing the facts and inverting normative priorities, it typically fails to remind its readers of facts that they might subliminally have known, and that would otherwise seem crucial to any inquiry or domain. So even if those facts were pro forma reported at one point, they’re quickly forgotten by the next. 

By the same method, the Times induces indifference to reality. For both ideological and financial reasons, the ideal Times subscriber regards its reporting as a self-contained, factually self-sufficient universe. The attitude involved is a bit like the satirical “Balliol rhyme” made of Benjamin Jowett, onetime Master of Balliol College, Oxford:

First come I. My name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

If you’re a good Times reader, you’re as indifferent to the world beyond the Times as the mythical Jowett was to the world beyond his head. If it doesn’t appear in the Times, it isn’t real. If it isn’t real, you can’t know it. If you can’t know it, you have no obligation to know it, however central to the action or explanatory of events. By this expedient, indifference becomes a kind of epistemic obligation, and epistemic mastery a function of the ignorance so induced. If you can’t know something, why try? But if the Times is all you need to know, why worry about it? There’s a fine line, it turns out, between nescience and omniscience.

If you want to know how and why we’re so often dragged “unwittingly” into sociopathic wars like the one in the Middle East, it’s right here in front of your eyes. Mainstream American news reporting is shit. The people working in it are propagandists. The “experts” invoked by it are stenographers for the American Imperium. The key to understanding them and their claims to “expertise” is to grasp that they’re not there to inform you. Just the reverse. They’re there to manipulate you into the acceptance of misinformation.

Once you see past the childish games these people play, it becomes child’s play to deconstruct their propaganda. Just vary your sources of information, forget partisan attachments, and focus on the facts. Once you do, you realize that these so-called experts and so-called journalists are paid to misinform, and can’t be trusted even with covering the simplest story, whether of the dog-bites-man variety or the reverse. 

So it is here. The US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon is a story of U.S. and Israeli aggression. That’s it. Two countries with delusions of moral grandeur have decided to attack a third and a fourth, causing incalculable pain, suffering, damage, and death, and coincidentally producing the strong likelihood of “strategic defeat” (aka defeat) for the aggressors.

The supposedly civilized and democratic populations of these countries, high on their own supply of falsehoods, have either passively let the war happen or actively egged it on. The mainstream news media, focused on all of the wrong questions, hostile on principle to any fact that might seriously upset the status quo, have happily contributed their share of epistemic malpractice to an otherwise hopeless situation. The cycle will continue until mainstream media companies hit mainstream resistance. Until then, count on being misinformed, count on being used, count on being “dragged unwittingly” into the next war, and count on mass death. 

If you don’t care, they don’t have to care. If they don’t have to care, your complicity in war crimes remains a constant. Don’t count on them to cover that. But count on its happening.