Trump's Iran Strikes Reveal We're in a New Era of Manufacturing Consent
Schuyler Mitchell , Truthout
Published June 24, 2025
Before all the images of smoldering cities, of hooded men tortured and beaten, and of bloodied bodies lying in the dust, there was Colin Powell holding up a vial.
On February 5, 2003, the then-U.S. secretary of state appeared before the United Nations Security Council and made a case for war with Iraq. Powell claimed that U.S. intelligence had shown that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax; Powell brought a small vial to illustrate how just one teaspoon of the biological agent could kill. Later — after the U.S had invaded Iraq, toppled the Hussein regime, contributed to the deaths of at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians, and failed to find any weapons of mass destruction — Powell admitted to regretting his UN speech. But the photos of that pivotal moment have lived on, a prime example of how U.S. leadership misled the public to galvanize support for an unjust war.
Now, the government doesn’t even attempt such pretense. On June 21, Donald Trump unilaterally authorized direct strikes on Iran. The White House didn’t spend months leveraging its influence over mainstream media to whip public sentiment into a war-hungry frenzy. It didn’t need to. That’s because we’re living in a new paradigm, one in which the government and media’s consent manufacturing apparatus has been eclipsed by something far more powerful: brute force.
In 2003, the majority of Americans supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Most also believed the faulty intelligence reports, heavily amplified by mainstream media, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Conversely, prior to Trump’s June 21 bombardment, 60 percent of Americans did not want the U.S. to directly partake in a military offensive in Iran. As the headline of one Current Affairs piece put it, “The War Hawks Aren’t Even Trying To Persuade Us Anymore.”
https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-iran-strikes-reveal-were-in-a-new-era-of-manufacturing-consent/