Who starts the war?

One of the challenges of journalism is to be fair when explaining who started a conflict. It is not easy, because you can always go back and find an explanation – but not a justification – for the other's action, and thus you can end up going back as far as Cain and Abel. The attack by the United States and Israel on Iran, however, demonstrates a double standard by Western media. While in the first days of the war in Ukraine most headlines included in their wording the illegality of the Russian military operation, in the present case there is more discretion. The fact that the ayatollah regime is barbaric should not turn the narrative into a festival of euphemisms. To put it in numbers: in the United Kingdom, 12,700 articles were published in February 2022 that spoke of the "invasion of Ukraine and 2,336 pieces explicitly stated that the attack was not in response to any provocation. In contrast, only 390 news reports now recall that the American and Israeli military action has been unilateral. Or what about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, downplayed as an "incursion" in many headlines.

In this perverse rhetoric, we are not far from the delirious search for weapons of mass destruction by the Axis of Evil. The sensation is that for forty years Iran, we are told, has been fifteen days away from acquiring an atomic weapon. In any case, in 2019 the American Defense Intelligence Agency wrote: "Iran's military strategy is basically defensive and is designed to deter an adversary, survive an initial attack, and counter-attack an aggressor to force a diplomatic solution." The threat from the Islamic country must be taken into account, but when opening the temporal focus to look for justifications, it would not be out of place to remember that American support for the Shah – to protect oil – caused the destabilization that allowed the ayatollahs to come to power. From that fire, these embers.