Por Nan Levinson
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A couple of wars ago, when I gave readings from my book War Is Not a Game, I sometimes tried to liven things up by asking the audience to guess which of the names I mentioned were for video games and which were for actual U.S. military campaigns. It didn’t work when there were veterans in the audience — they were too familiar with both — but it did vividly point up the kinship of war and entertainment in our world.
Now, welcome to Operation Epic Fury, the perfect name for an adolescent-id-on-steroids-style war. That name was, of course, chosen by Donald (“How do you like the performance?”) Trump for his campaign against Iran, while his White House social-media team created actual mash-ups of games and reality to match. For example, on X.com, Undefeated alternates cartoon characters scoring points in an array of sports with images of bombs hitting their targets, and Instagram features a loop of baseball batters getting strikes interwoven with, yep, bomb strikes. So, I guess I was wrong. These days, war is a game, even if the only way to win it is to keep moving the goalposts.
The U.S. military has frequently promoted the game-like aspects of war. The title of my book, in fact, came from an action that a group of veterans affiliated with what was then Iraq Veterans Against the War (now About Face) staged in front of an Army recruiting booth at a jobs fair, where job-seekers were being enticed to play a war-simulation game. More recently, the Army’s “What’s Your Warrior?” recruitment campaign, while deemphasizing direct combat, includes videos that feature luminescent soldiers who resemble superheroes and characters in video games.
However, this does seem like the first time that a White House has joined quite so enthusiastically in the fun. Past presidents may have been cheerleaders for their wars, but they still retained a certain gravitas and respect for the grimness of combat. That was then — like, the last 250 years — while now, it’s game time for Donald Trump and his administration, who take contemptuous pride in smashing political norms, the more crass, careless, and callous, the merrier.
But suppose war doesn’t put you in a playful mood? Suppose your role in wartime is to inform the American public about what’s going on? Suppose you’re an American journalist? How the hell do you do your job?
Anointed by Jesus to Make War on Iran
You report the facts, of course: when the war began, how many countries are involved, how many people have been killed (especially American troops), how much oil is or isn’t passing through the strategically essential Strait of Hormuz, and why the International Energy Agency deemed blocking it “the biggest crude supply disruption in oil market history.” But you can check and recheck every fact and still get the story wrong, since this story — thank you, Donald Trump and crew — keeps lurching all over the place,
For starters, there have been the regularly shifting rationales for launching and continuing the war (which the president has deemed just “a little excursion”) and the even more elusive goals that could signify when whatever it’s called will end. In early March, The Atlantic did a running tally of the reasons Trump has offered for going to war. The primary ones were preventing “imminent threats” to the U.S. and its allies, denying Iran nuclear weapons, ending its support for terrorism in the region, liberating Iranians from a repressive government, giving up on failed negotiations, and (as he proclaimed in his usual CAPS on Truth Social), PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD! — which, of course, is best achieved by bombing a country to smithereens and slaughtering the people you’re liberating.
Secretary of War (forget about Defense!) Pete Hegseth, when he’s not worrying about unflattering photos of himself, seems to go in more for vengeance and dominance, but echoed his boss with the Orwellian declaration, “[W]ar, in this context and in pursuit of peace, is necessary.” I think, however, that my — if I can even use the word — favorite, reason for the war, seems to have come from a combat-unit commander who announced in a briefing that Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” That exhortation is unverified, but as of early March, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported receiving more than 200 complaints from all branches of the military about similar comments, and a little while later, Hegseth, in his official capacity, told Americans to pray for victory over Iran “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
As for when the hostilities would end, Trump has vacillated between asserting that the conflict will be brief and that it could go on for months, that Iran is about to surrender or negotiate and that he will accept nothing short of “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” In a phone call to the Brian Kilmeade Show, he insisted that he’ll know it’s over “[w]hen I feel it, OK, feel it in my bones.”
There is, perhaps, a tactical advantage to never truly pinning down the purpose or endgame of the war because, whatever happens, whenever Trump “feels it,” he can declare victory, take his warships and go home, while whining that his actions represent another reason he’s owed a Nobel Peace Prize.
Polycrisis in War
The term polycrisis is a fancy name for the clusterfuck that results when several, separate crises interact to create a grand, all-inclusive crisis. The ongoing Iran war polycrisis includes so many vectors that journalists on nearly every beat have, it seems, skin in the game.
There are the military maneuvers in the region, at least the ones the Pentagon has owned up to, and a crash course in drones and other modern munitions. There are the ever-mounting costs to American taxpayers (one running estimate puts it at $34.8 billion and counting 30 days into the war); to the environment (check out “black rain”); to servicemembers and their families (traumatic brain injury is the prevalent injury); to the Iranian people; to all of us, thanks to the soaring price of oil (rising at times to over $100 a barrel) with its domino effect on American wallets; to the stock market and the world economy; and to whatever hope of coexistence there ever was in the Middle East before the bombing began.
Then, there are all the politics: in Iran, with its uncertain leadership; in countries not directly involved in the war, but affected by it like lucky Russia and unlucky Ukraine; in the U.S., with all the constitutional and legal questions raised and still unanswered; and internationally, as my country flouts any version of the rules of war and begs its supposed allies for help (or denounces them for not coming to its rescue). There are, of course, inevitable comparisons with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and its long, disastrous aftermath; horse-race reporting on what all this means for the fall midterm elections; and polls taking the American pulse on the war. Even sports couldn’t remain completely on the sidelines when President Trump suggested that Iran bow out of this summer’s World Cup matches in the U.S.
Phew! I’m already out of breath! And that’s not even including the rapid changes that can make a news story outdated within hours of being filed.
Reporting Iran
It’s complicated enough to report on a multifaceted polycrisis, but reporting on Iran, where there has been a near-total news blackout since the start of the war, presents particular difficulties. To put it mildly, that country has not been a friendly place for American reporters, or for that matter, for its own journalists. Reporters without Borders ranks it fifth from last of 180 countries in its 2025 press freedom index, while the Committee to Protect Journalists counts at least 15 members of the press in Iranian prisons now. All journalists there must register with the Culture Ministry and news outlets can be suspended or summarily closed for an array of vague offenses. Add to that the American and Israeli air strikes, which killed an Iranian journalist and damaged several media outlets.
Only one Western network reporter, Frederik Pleitgen of CNN, was given a visa to enter Iran when the war began. He ended each broadcast with this disclaimer: “CNN is able to report in Iran only with the Iranian government’s permission.” Everyone else must work from afar, reading between the lines of Iran’s state-aligned outlets, trying to gather reliable information through regional bureaus or human rights organizations on the ground, and verifying the often suspect social-media feeds that make it out of the country.
The U.S. government hasn’t been particularly helpful either. Last fall, when the Defense Department demanded that journalists sign a restrictive pledge or lose their credentials to report from inside the Pentagon, dozens of respected and seasoned reporters walked out, resulting in limited reporting about the war. (The situation of those Pentagon reporters is also changing daily.) More recently, the Department of War (formerly Defense) decided to “modernize” the previously independent newspaper Stars and Stripes, which will mean far greater editorial control by the Pentagon.
Information into and out of Iran has also been curtailed by Kari Lake, the (apparently illegal) head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, who eviscerated Radio Free Asia and, during the recent protests in Iran, denied Radio Fardo, the Persian-language service, access to the transmission facilities it needed to broadcast into that country. And after Trump had a hissy fit over unfavorable coverage of the war, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr continued his slippery slide toward censorship by threatening to revoke the licenses of broadcasters “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Meanwhile, in February, The Washington Post laid off its Middle East reporters and editors.
What We Miss
War, for all its messiness, makes good news (at least for the news media). It’s exciting, immediate, nonstop, consequential — and it certainly is, however grimly, a spectacle, lit up with drama and horror that can bring out the best in journalism. Yet the established news media have taken a while to figure out how to report on Donald Trump’s war. Inevitably, there is much that they miss.
Donald Trump is, of course, adept in his own strange fashion at playing the media, distracting and shifting the focus away from things he doesn’t want to talk about. This time around, he has exchanged his usual government by Truth Social for phone chats with individual reporters. In case you’ve lost track of how many such calls he’s taken since the war began, the Columbia Journalism Review/CJR conveniently offered a non-exhaustive list of 13 reporters from nine outlets he talked with, some multiple times, in the first weeks of the war.
For a journalist, getting the president to take your call or answer multiple questions is a big win. That’s especially true when Trump, in full babble, reveals more than he probably meant to. For instance, in a press gaggle on Air Force One 16 days into the war, as he was arguing that NATO allies owed it to the U.S. to send ships to guard the Strait of Hormuz, he added, “You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all, because we don’t need it. We have a lot of oil.” (Ever notice that when something he’s responsible for goes wrong, he says, “we,” and when something is accomplished, whether thanks to him or not, he says, “I”? ) But as CJR noted, the problem isn’t reporters taking advantage of access to the president, but their treating his utterances, no matter how nonsensical or incoherent, as breaking news (often without even vetting them for veracity).
Remember “the president of peace“? Journalists have certainly reminded us of Trump’s campaign promises not to start wars, but even that inconsistency plays into his game of distraction. And his cynical tactic has worked. The still-unspooling Epstein scandal, the inhumane immigrant round-ups, and whatever we’ve been doing in Latin America or the Caribbean Sea have been largely relegated to some other world. Even the inconvenient affordability issue was elided until the war sent the price of oil soaring.
Also missing from much reporting has been context. In an excellent compilation on how to cover the Iran crisis, the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents USA suggested that journalists “remember that Iran is not only a theater of conflict. It is also a society.” Journalism, by its nature, doesn’t lend itself to deep, contextual analysis, but when it comes to Iran, it would be useful to supply some background for many Americans who know all too little about that country, including that it’s a large, complex nation with a rich culture and a long, illustrious history, only a relatively short part of which has been interwoven with the United States. Explaining that might help us all resist the reductive good/evil framing championed by a government at war.
Not that there hasn’t been thoughtful analysis from newsroom columnists and alternative platforms. Substacks like Margaret Sullivan’s “American Crisis” and newsletters like the “Equator” have brought depth to such war coverage. The dominant media have done some not-so-subtle pushback, too, labeling it “Trump’s war” — the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen called it the “third Gulf war” — and also using the dreaded word “quagmire,” even if only as a possibility. And as Trump would surely agree, nobody likes a loser, so as his excursion into war in the Middle East has been transformed into a giant losing proposition, the criticism has become more pointed and direct.
What I am missing most in the reporting, though, is any mention of peace. By peace, I don’t mean the cheap rebranding of the U.S. Institute of Peace with Trump’s name, or the parody known as Trump’s Board of Peace (stocked with countries that have been cited for human rights abuses). Nor do I mean just the cessation of bombs and missiles dropping on Iran and Lebanon, though that would be a good start, or even antiwar demonstrations, though such events can draw much-needed media attention.
When your job is to report on war, what you see is war in all its ramifications. But if your job were to report on peace, you would see the conditions for a positive, durable peace and report on them as realistic, attainable, and as potentially heroic as marching off to battle. It may seem counterintuitive, silly even, to ask for that kind of reporting in the throes of this ill-begotten war, but that’s when we need it most. War — even a “good” or “just” one — is brutal, pitiless, and destructive. Trump’s war is international terrorism at its most extreme and, if it were a game, it would be one where everyone loses something.
But in our better natures, we know that war really isn’t a game. Don’t we?
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
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