There has been a months-long build-up for some kind of military confrontation with Iran that finally culminated in American and Israeli strikes on the country on Feb. 28. Still, few people understand the reasons why, including, it seems, those greenlighting the attacks. Is it a response to recent mass protests and state retaliation, or is it the result of failed nuclear negotiations? The Trump administration has not done much to construct a strong media narrative to garner public consent beyond a few initial game- and meme-ified propaganda videos that look like they were designed to convince a 13-year-old boy that war is cool, not to drum up support from any voting adult.
I recently re-read journalist Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and was struck by its continued relevance as well as its potential for explaining the U.S-Israeli bombardment of Iran, which has drawn attention both for its domestic unpopularity and its atrocities, including the bombing of an elementary school that left over a hundred children dead.
Klein’s book traces two interrelated phenomena that have emerged over the last half-century. The first is what she calls the shock doctrine, which relies on the idea that people in a state of shock are more malleable and accepting of things they would oppose under normal circumstances, a discovery made thanks in large part to CIA torture techniques used in Latin America. Essentially, the doctrine holds that the best time to implement devastating and unpopular laissez-faire free-market capitalism is in the wake of a major crisis, be it a natural disaster, pandemic or war. Friedman himself stated in his book, Capitalism and Freedom, “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
Klein shows how neoliberal economics has come about largely in times of collective trauma, with privatization, deregulation and deep cuts in social spending pushed through simultaneously before people can recover from the initial crisis. The book goes through dozens of examples of this shock doctrine, from privatization under dictatorship in Chile and Argentina to the intentional replacement of public schools with charter schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. As Klein points out, it is easy to miss these kinds of systemic, seemingly abstract policy changes when one is temporarily homeless or recovering the bodies of loved ones.
Born from the desire to profit off of suffering, Klein refers to this trend as disaster capitalism. In the second half of her book, Klein illustrates the impact of the Bush administration and the post-9/11 world, as disaster capitalism moves beyond simply pushing through economic reforms after catastrophe to creating or prolonging catastrophes for economic gain.
Klein articulates that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the perfect culmination of these two ideologies. The U.S. military objective, she writes, was to level Iraqi society, to create a kind of tabula rasa on which to build a perfectly Friedmanite society in which private actors performed all government functions. Much like the MK-ULTRA experiments were designed to erase a person’s sense of self to achieve an ideal one, the idea was to shock Iraqis into accepting a totally different way of being. The trauma inflicted on the Iraqi people came in the form of historical erasure—unchecked looting and destruction of millennia-old artifacts—and the actual violence of death and torture—most notably at Abu Ghraib.
Klein describes the post-invasion Iraqi state as a “model of hollow governance,” where every state function, from defense to electricity, is run by private companies. The result is not a thriving, democratic government but a dysfunctional state with underserved and increasingly factional populations. These private companies are not at all bothered by the utter chaos and desolation they create, because they profit immensely from the arrangement, especially if the ensuing crisis generates more opportunities to win contracts—all at the expense of the American taxpayer. As Klein writes, “The only prospect that threatens the booming disaster economy on which so much wealth depends—from weapons to oil to engineering to surveillance to patented drugs– is the possibility of achieving some measure of climatic stability and geopolitical peace.”
Operation Epic Fury, an almost laughably videogame-esque name, will likely take Iran—a country already impoverished by a brutal decades-long sanctions regime—down a similar path. With no clear plan for the country’s future leadership, nor any sort of political will on behalf of the Americans to stabilize the nation, Iran may become another casualty of the disaster capitalism complex. The strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school already embodies the implications of army functions contracting out to private companies. The Pentagon report indicated that the strike was a “targeting error” based on decade-old data provided by a third-party defense agency.
Writing about parallels to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Beirut-based journalist Séamus Malekafzali states, “Trump wanted war, as did Netanyahu, but there was no conception of when it should happen, for what cause it should exactly be waged, and what would even be done. There was want, but there was no will, and there was no way.”
While it is not a new phenomenon to start winnable battles to unify a divided nation and distract from domestic unpopularity, the justificatory propaganda that normally accompanies this type of political maneuver has been relatively muted. “Declarations of an ‘armada’ being sent to Iran’s shores were accompanied by demands to stop killing protesters, even though the protests had ceased days earlier.”
The White House has not produced satisfactory excuses, opting instead to share lazy half-truths. Whether this is because they believe the American electorate is so disengaged that it won’t bother to fact-check or think critically, or if it is because they believe themselves to be immune from popular discontent, is an interesting question. It could also be a conscious decision to underplay U.S. involvement because of our recent collective memory of ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East; after Iraq and Afghanistan, it is practically political suicide to commit to occupying a country and putting boots on the ground.
One government employee briefed on the Iranian bombardment told The Intercept that the administration does “not have an actual, real rationale, endgame, or plan for the aftermath of this.”
Another said, “It’s not coordinated regime change. It’s just ‘bomb them until they’re less of a threat.” Invoking the U.S.’ 1953 coup that deposed the democratically elected Iranian government, one official said, “People in Iran remember. We do not.”
Even though assassination by U.S. government officials is illegal under Executive Order 12333, Trump has overthrown two regimes in two months this year, first by the kidnapping of Maduro and again with the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. If regime change is the goal, though, the U.S. is unprepared to fill the void it has created.
Trump told reporters in early March, “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person… It would probably be the worst, you go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.”
With the appointment of the more extreme Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader, the late Ali Khamenei’s son, Trump’s worst-case scenario appears to have occurred.
Unable to provide more specifics, Trump told NBC, “We want them to have a good leader. We have some people who I think would do a good job,” though he did not say who. This leads me to another important point: most mainstream news outlets are covering the seemingly impulsive attacks and the whatever-goes attitude adopted by American officials in their wake. However, I have yet to see one that interrogates what role the U.S. should play in selecting who governs a country over 6,000 miles away.
Perhaps it is the natural outgrowth of American exceptionalism and our self-image as the global defenders of ‘democracy’ (read, free-market capitalism) that gives us this sense of entitlement, but I am not sure why this seems so difficult for people to grasp; the only people who have the right to overthrow the Iranian government are the Iranian people.
The people who live in Iran, who are governed by its laws and speak its languages, get to choose who rules them, not the U.S. Army, and certainly not a president currently receiving largely negative approval ratings. No matter how angry many Americans might be about the Epstein files or ICE violence against communities nationwide, you would be hard-pressed to get a majority of us to support a Russian military operation aiming to topple Trump’s administration.
Even more importantly, stating that it is unlawful for Trump to overthrow governments in Venezuela or Iran is not the same as issuing a blanket statement of support for those governments. Just because Iranians took to the streets in protest does not mean they were asking for American intervention. Ryan Costello of the National Iranian American Council told The Intercept, “I think a lot of the people on the streets who participated in the protests did so for domestic reasons and also would oppose the U.S. bombing the country.”
The role of the private sector in encouraging military intervention cannot be ignored, either. These corporations see coups and military interventions, according to Klein, as a means to an end rather than a goal.
Then there is the much-discussed nuclear justification. First of all, Trump’s claim that Iran could develop nuclear weapons in a matter of days is blatantly false; the U.S. government admitted in its 2025 Annual Threat Assessment that former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had not reauthorized the suspended nuclear weapons program, despite pressure to do so.
Just as Klein describes the existence of WMDs in Iraq as the “lowest-common-denominator justification” for the 2003 invasion, nuclear weapons appear to be one of a few admittedly halfhearted attempts to explain an otherwise unpopular war. Other empty excuses include vague references to ending authoritarianism and the same pink-washing we saw in the build-up to the invasion of Afghanistan. It is safe to say that women in Afghanistan are no more liberated than they were when the U.S. first intervened, and many are likely worse off.
Furthermore, people who claim that Iranian nuclear weapons would be catastrophic for peace in the region are ignoring the very real danger that already exists. Israel, arguably the most historically and currently belligerent state actor in the region, has had nuclear weapons for decades, and it has publicly stated that it has no qualms about deploying them against its neighbors in what it calls the “Samson option.”
If anything, there is an argument that Iranian nuclear acquisition could bring some measure of regional stability, if one believes that two adversaries with equal destructive capacity are more likely to arrive at a stalemate and relative stability. One could also argue, as Costello does, that the invasion of Iran might actually encourage American adversaries to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent against outside attacks.
When asked by The Intercept what the message of the American invasion was, Costello responded, “This tells any potential adversaries of the U.S.: Get nuclear weapons. Hedging is not a strategy, and giving up your program like [Muammar] Gaddafi is not a strategy. The only successful strategy is what Kim Jong Un did, which is to get nuclear weapons.” Look at Libya, look at Iraq—that may be the future for states whose policies are seen as unfavorable to the U.S. and who do not possess nuclear weapons.
Ultimately, what Klein demonstrates in her book is that war and destruction are immensely profitable for a small group of elites who not only exercise substantial policy influence through lobbying but are, in many cases, former public servants themselves. The revolving door between private sector weapons development and Cabinet positions, for instance, has become more of an archway thanks to the hard work of figures like Bush and Rumsfeld.
The attacks on Iran also come at a time when U.S. hegemony appears to be waning, be it through de-dollarization and BRICS international and domestic discontent over American unwillingness to call out the genocide against Palestinians, or the current administration’s general insanity. As Klein writes, “warfare is always partly a form of performance, always a form of mass communication.”