Swanson -- The Wars Are Still Based on Lies

The Wars Are Still Based on Lies

Leave a Comment / July 28, 2026

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 28, 2026

Excerpted from War Is Still A Lie.

Since I wrote War Is A Lie in 2010 and updated it in 2015, the lies used to prop up wars have varied but continued. My summary remains true:

Not a single thing that we commonly believe about wars that helps keep them around is true. Wars cannot be good or glorious. Nor can they be justified as a means of achieving peace or anything else of value. The reasons given for wars, before, during, and after them (often three very different sets of reasons for the same war) are all false. It is common to imagine that, because we’d never go to war without a good reason, having gone to war, we simply must have a good reason. This needs to be reversed. Because there can be no good reason for war, having gone to war, we are participating in a lie.

But some things have changed. The Iraq Syndrome has ended. The Iraq Syndrome, modeled on the Vietnam Syndrome, was a reluctance to support more wars because of the experience of having lived through the Iraq War. Such reluctance is generally understood as an illness rather than as temporary enlightenment. While John Kerry, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and many other Iraq War supporters who didn’t come as close as they did, all failed to become president, Donald Trump and Joe Biden did not fail.

Both Trump and Biden did the Iraq Syndrome the courtesy of pretending they had opposed attacking Iraq. There’s no evidence that Trump had done that. Biden had in reality been a leading supporter of launching that war. Apparently lying about that past was seen as a sufficient level of decency for this new age. But there was no requirement that, even in retrospect, you criticize the Iraq War for a reason suggesting a general aversion to wars. Trump’s most common criticism was that the United States had failed to take Iraq’s oil. It was nice to think he was joking, but President Trump spoke at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency on January 23, 2017, and promoted a policy of waging wars for the theft of resources.

Major ground wars with thousands of U.S. troops dying are now being avoided. As U.S. deaths are the only deaths that count for much in most corporate U.S. journalism, this can create the impression that wars have largely gone away, the focus on the small number of U.S. deaths in the war on Iran, and on the lying about them, not withstanding.

U.S. media coverage of wars, when it happens, tends to downplay the U.S. role. The war in Ukraine received major attention for a time — including absolutely remarkable coverage of war victims (if all sides of all wars were covered the way one side of this one was, war might just shrivel up and die). But mostly the war in Ukraine was falsely depicted as something the U.S. government had little or nothing to do with . . . and ought to have more to do with. The war on Gaza also garnered attention — including through the new power of social media to influence corporate media — but much of the reporting was heavily slanted toward defending those engaged in genocide. Any reports of denunciation by U.S. officials of the mass killing tended to helpfully omit the U.S. role in arming, funding, legally protecting, and collaboratively propagandizing in support of it. As the corporate media took seriously U.S. claims to “oppose” the horrors being inflicted on Palestinians, the satirical journal, The Onion, ran the headline: “Trump Writes Netanyahu Strongly Worded Check.”

Wars continued, of course, by the dozens, including air wars, drone wars, proxy wars, U.S.-armed wars, coups, and imperial national takeovers under the threat of war. I was surprised in visiting Venezuela, shortly after the U.S. military had attacked its capital and kidnapped its president, how frequently people brought up their fear of meeting the same fate as Gaza — that is, absolute devastation.

Major lies that have gone largely unquestioned include the lie that, despite so many horrible and unpopular wars, there may be a good war soon, the lie that funding war preparations is disconnected from funding wars, the dangerous new lie that funding war preparations is a public service of which we can never have too much, and the lie that war is something that people or governments all do to roughly the same extent.

Of course, not everyone has opposed even one side, much less both, of all wars during this period. There have been moments when many people could have picked out an existing war and labeled it a good one (either glorious or evil but necessary). I cover in the book why I think they would have been wrong, even though most wars rapidly lose their popularity, so that people I disagreed with a few years ago are likely to agree with me now. But even opponents of wars are prone to imagine that an absolutely unprecedented good war (or a nonsensical revival of World War II in a radically different world) is just around the corner — or at least to assume that no matter how bad other wars are, the current wars are so uniquely bad that they aren’t wars at all. Example after endless example wears away at this fantasy.

Is funding war preparations disconnected from funding wars? War makers don’t think so. Trump remarked in 2026, when accused of violating a promise to not wage wars:

“I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

Why indeed? Unless you actually believed the tall tale that peace comes through military strength and deterrence? Scholars who are not funded by weapons companies do not seem to believe that story either. In 2025, the United Nations Development Programme published a report warning against increased military spending. “The evidence is clear: excessive military spending does not guarantee peace,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in presenting the report. “It often undermines it – fueling arms races, deepening mistrust, and diverting resources from the very foundations of stability.” The report included this summary: “The steady rise in global military expenditure is reshaping the international security landscape in ways that constrain both fiscal and political space for prevention, diplomacy, and dialogue. While States cite national security concerns to justify these increases, the cumulative effect has been to weaken multilateralism, sideline preventive mechanisms, and narrow channels for the peaceful resolution of disputes.”

Of course, when people called Trump “the peace candidate” during each election, some of us pointed toward his demand for higher military spending, but we could not point to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris as “the real peace candidate.” We could only note the mistake of identifying a peace candidate in the absence of any.

In and out of office, Trump became the leading proponent of an especially powerful lie, one made more insidious by usually not being articulated. Trump demanded that military spending, by the U.S. and other governments, be increased as a percentage of an economy or gross domestic product (GDP). This communicated, without saying it, that military spending should be measured as a percentage of an economy, rather than as an absolute number of dollars or as a number of dollars per capita. For U.S. hawks this had a certain advantage. Measured by the number of dollars spent, U.S. military spending is hardly in the same universe as the rest of the world; to show it on the chart, you have to make a graph of all the other countries, tack it to the wall, and then tack a dozen extra pieces of paper above it, up the wall and partway across the ceiling, in order to include the United States. But measured as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. could fit onto a chart with other countries. What’s more, the numbers were much smaller. Two percent just sounds littler than one trillion. More importantly, the numbers were pulled out of thin air and could be increased at will. When Trump began demanding 2 percent, some of us warned that if he got it he would demand more. Before we’d taken a breath, he’d switched over to 5 percent. But worst of all is the understanding that followed from converting all conversations about military spending to these terms. If military spending were the counterproductive evil some of us believe, then it would need to be reduced to zero. If it were a necessary evil, as many think, then it would need to be calibrated to match the supposed danger and could be reduced through disarmament agreements or through the elimination of weapons and bases not addressing the actual need. But if military spending is something that must be maximized by arbitrarily demanding ever more of it, then it must be a public service or some other sort of end in itself. Trump could even get away with ceasing to call all warmaking “defense” and restore an honest label to the U.S. War Department, as long as war was going to be, in its entirety, a philanthropic enterprise. Nations that invested too little in preparing for mass slaughter could be denounced as poor global citizens. Those that answered the demands of Trump and of the Secretary General of NATO by defunding healthcare and retirement in order to dump crazy amounts into war could be lauded as responsible stewards of the Earth.

Funny if not so tragic: people propagandized for generations to call war “defense” have ignored Trump and insisted on sticking to the Orwellian name “Defense Department,” another indication that they believe in the possibility of good and proper wars.

I mentioned one more lie, the lie that war is something that people or governments all do to roughly the same extent. “Boys will be boys,” “War is human nature,” “Capitalism creates war,” “War is everywhere,” — this sort of rhetoric makes less sense if we admit that 96 percent of humanity just doesn’t do war on remotely the same scale as this 4 percent of people here in the United States. In the summer of 2026, Trump was demanding that Congress fork over $1.5 trillion in military spending. But according to a report from the Project on Government Oversight, U.S. military spending was already $1.5 to $1.7 trillion per year, or — if you include (and why shouldn’t you?) interest on debt for past military spending, $1.7 to $2.3 trillion per year. The variations among the five different calculations featured in the report had a lot to do with the complexity and obscurity of the U.S. government, including the variety of sources of government data that can be used. It takes serious research to dig the militarism out, as it’s hidden everywhere. But the big-ticket items are things like “Homeland Security,” veterans’ benefits, and debt interest.

The report gives us not the slightest hint at any reason to doubt the highest figure. If that $2.3 trillion per year is correct, and if Trump’s servants on Capitol Hill add another $0.5 trillion just for kicks plus another $0.2 trillion specifically for destroying Iran and rebuilding the bases that Iran destroyed — and the pending destruction of which was the immediate excuse for the war — then we’ll be at $3 trillion. . . and — barring the appearance of a spine in a significant number of members of Congress — another $3 trillion or more the next year and the next and the next.

The military budget figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are widely used, in part because SIPRI provides them for most nations on Earth so that one can do comparisons. But SIPRI has the U.S. at $0.95 trillion in 2025. The report from POGO suggests that SIPRI’s omission of veterans’ benefits may be a bigger mistake for the United States (which has waged so many wars) than it would be for some other countries. The U.S. government also far outpaces the rest of the world’s nations when it comes to debt. And less of other nations’ smaller debts may be due to wars they haven’t waged. So, possibly it is not completely outrageous to make a comparison between the real level of U.S. military spending and SIPRI’s level of everybody else’s military spending. (Note that SIPR has no 2025 data for Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea.)

In 2025, the entire non-U.S. world for which SIPRI has data spent $1.86 trillion on militaries. China spent $0.336 trillion, Russia $0.19 trillion, Iran $0.007 trillion. Meanwhile the U.S. was at $2.3 trillion, vastly more than the rest of the world combined, or over 4 times its three designated enemies combined. The U.S. and its allies and partners and weapons customers in 2025 (that is, every government except the three designated enemies) spent $3.63 trillion or almost 7 times the combined spending of the three designated enemies.

The reason the U.S. government cannot win a war is not a lack of spending, but a lack of any coherent meaning to the concept of “winning a war.” There is no amount of murder and destruction that persuades survivors to like or willingly obey you. There just isn’t. The United States and world would be made vastly safer by spending less on war and more on actual aid, cooperation, the rule of law, disarmament, diplomacy, and unarmed civilian defense.

To our great credit, the current war on Iran is less popular faster than wars of the past. It took a year and a half for a majority to say that the war on Afghanistan or the war on Iraq should not have been started, and even then you didn’t have a majority for ending each of those wars. They had to be continued for the supposed benefit of the troops. Now we have a big majority for ending a war. We just have too little being done about it beyond telling the pollsters that we’ve caught on to the lying. If we’d fully caught on, we would be boycotting, disrupting, blockading, and shutting down the U.S. government until it came into compliance with the law. 

https://davidswanson.org/the-wars-are-still-based-on-lies/