On February 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Explosions across Tehran. Airspace closed. Cell signals cut. Israel declared a state of emergency and called it a “preemptive strike.” Two U.S. officials told NBC the strikes are “significant” and “not small.”

Nobody can say what the objective is. That’s because the people running this war have three different objectives, and none of them are the one being stated publicly.

The Money

Miriam Adelson gave Trump $100 million for the 2024 campaign — more than Elon Musk. Her late husband Sheldon publicly called for nuking Iran at Yeshiva University in 2013: detonate a bomb in the desert, then tell Tehran the next one lands on them. Miriam continued the family’s political investment without changing the thesis. She reportedly conditioned her support on Trump recognizing Israeli annexation of the West Bank — ending any prospect of a Palestinian state permanently. Her spokesperson denied the quid pro quo. Her longtime confidant Rabbi Shmuley Boteach confirmed she opposes any Palestinian state.

At a White House Hanukkah reception in December 2025, Adelson told Trump she’d spoken with Alan Dershowitz about “four more years” and offered him “another $250 million” to run for a third term. As Haaretz reported:

[Adelson] really wants from Trump’s second term is an Israeli annexation of the West Bank and a U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty in all the regions of the land.

The Adelsons have sent approximately $600 million in political contributions to support Trump’s three presidential campaigns and Republican races since 2015. That’s not a donation. That’s a controlling stake.

The Theology

The Secretary of Defense has “Deus Vult” tattooed on his arm — “God wills it,” the battle cry of the First Crusade. He has a Jerusalem Cross on his chest. He wrote a book called American Crusade. He belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a Christian Reconstructionist denomination whose goal, as religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll describes it, is “to reestablish biblical law as the standard for society.”

In 2018, speaking at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Hegseth said:

There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.

Building a third Jewish temple on the Temple Mount requires destroying Al-Aqsa Mosque — Islam’s third-holiest site. As scholar Matthew Taylor noted,

That is grounds for an interreligious World War III.

Hegseth told the Israeli audience to take advantage of Trump being in office because there were “true believers” in Washington who would back them. He used the biblical names “Judea and Samaria” for the West Bank, endorsing Israeli settlement and annexation as preconditions for messianic events. Facts on the ground, he said, “truly matter.”

This is the man running the Pentagon as bombs fall on Tehran.

The Prophecy

For many in Trump’s evangelical base, war with Iran is not a policy failure or a strategic risk. It is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel with its claimed 30 million members, told Fox News that Trump was uniquely suited to pursue a “biblically mandated policy of cutting down Israel’s enemies.” Mike Evans, founder of Friends of Zion, cited Genesis 12:

I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, texted Trump before the June 2025 strikes:

God saved you in Butler, Pennsylvania, to be the most consequential president in a century, and perhaps ever.

He compared Trump to Truman in 1945 — the president who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. He told Trump to listen to God’s voice and said he would “hear from heaven.”

Trump posted the text publicly, then ended his address after the June strikes by thanking God first and the military second.

The dispensationalist theology driving this is straightforward: the repatriation of Jews to Israel and their subsequent conversion to Christianity are pivotal signs that the end times are at hand. Netanyahu’s vision of greater Israel supplies the glide path to Final Judgment. Iran, identified with the biblical Persia in Ezekiel’s prophecy, must be defeated for the sequence to advance. As evangelical author Greg Laurie wrote after last year’s strikes, “This is biblical foreshadowing.”

Israel named its June 2025 operation “Rising Lion” from Numbers 23:24:

The people shall rise as a great lion… he shall not lie down until he eats of the prey, and drinks the blood of the slain.

Netanyahu placed a handwritten note at the Western Wall quoting the verse before ordering the strikes.

Diana Butler Bass, a religious historian who grew up in this tradition, wrote after the June strikes:

I absolutely know that Trump’s evangelical and Pentecostal supporters — the core of MAGA — are cheering. Bombing Iran secures Trump’s status as God’s man, the one sent to fulfill the prophetic promises that lead to the return of Jesus.

These people are not on the fringe. They are the base. They are in the Pentagon, the embassy in Jerusalem, and the White House. And they believe this morning’s explosions in Tehran are God’s work.

The Self-Renewing Justification

In June 2025, Trump announced that U.S. strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity. By January 2026, satellite imagery showed reconstruction at Natanz and Isfahan. By February, Trump told Congress that Iran was “starting it all over again.” The IAEA disputed the original claim.

So the same targets get hit again under the same justification. If you already obliterated the nuclear program and it came back, then strikes don’t solve the stated problem. They create a recurring revenue model for military operations. The justification regenerates itself because the objective was never achievable by the means employed.

This is the Russia-Syria template. Russia framed its Syria intervention as counter-ISIS but functionally destroyed the opposition and preserved Assad. Russia bombed during Geneva peace talks — repeatedly — using negotiations as timing cover, not as an alternative to force.

Same architecture here. Geneva talks making “significant progress” according to Oman’s mediator. Technical discussions scheduled for Vienna next week. Strikes launched anyway. The talks were the clock, not the path.

The Restraint Cycle Is Broken

Last June, Iran gave the U.S. advance warning before retaliating at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. A choreographed off-ramp. This time, Iran has signaled it will fight “in a much less constrained manner than before.” Iran’s UN ambassador declared “all bases, facilities and assets of the hostile force in the region” are legitimate targets.

Iran’s shorter-range missile arsenal was largely untouched by last year’s strikes. U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain are closer and easier to hit than Israel. The two carrier strike groups in the Gulf provide what one analyst called a “target-rich environment.” The massive buildup designed to project power also concentrates vulnerability.

No Authorization

Congress was scheduled to vote on war powers resolutions next week. Those votes are now retroactive to a war already started. As NPR’s David Sanger noted, Trump didn’t even mention congressional authorization in his State of the Union. A preventive war — striking to prevent a future capability rather than responding to an imminent threat — has generally been considered illegal under the rules of just war. But legality requires someone to enforce it.

The administration itself can’t agree on what it wants. JD Vance thinks he sounds smart when he self contradicts:

We’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran…’s nuclear programme.

Trump posted:

If the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!

Thune says regime change is the only worthwhile objective. Tillis wants another bombing raid. Hegseth wants to rebuild the temple. Huckabee wants the Second Coming.

The Quiet Beneficiary

In January, I wrote that Trump’s Iran threats functioned as coercive arbitrage — creating supply instability to push oil companies toward Venezuelan investment. Iran covers 4% of global oil demand. Venezuela covers 1%. Destabilize the 4% to unlock the 1%. The Strait of Hormuz carries 25% of global oil. Disruption pushes prices toward $120/barrel, transforming Venezuela’s massive infrastructure investment from marginal to essential.

That mechanism doesn’t disappear with actual strikes. It accelerates. Every bomb on Iranian infrastructure is an argument for Western Hemisphere energy investment that no sales pitch could make. And once oil companies commit billions to an unstable regime, they become dependent on continued U.S. military presence to protect those assets. The trap closes.

Trump said yesterday he isn’t concerned that strikes would raise oil prices. “I am concerned about people’s lives.” This from the man who told Iran’s protesters to “keep protesting” while his administration was killing people in ICE operations at home.

A War Without an End

A war without a defined objective is a war that never has to justify stopping. “Remove Iran’s nuclear threat” is infinitely elastic. You can’t prove a negative. You can destroy facilities and they rebuild. The objective exists to authorize force, not to constrain it.

But the deeper problem is that the actual objectives of Adelson’s annexation, Hegseth’s temple, Hagee’s prophecy, the oil arbitrage are not objectives that can be stated, debated, or voted on.

They operate beneath the nuclear justification like an engine beneath a hood. The stated reason and the actual reason have fully decoupled.

And there is the oldest reason of all. The DOJ spent months surgically withholding FBI documents showing what Trump did to a 13-year-old girl at Mar-a-Lago. The files came out anyway. A war buries what a cover-up couldn’t. Barry Levinson made this film in 1998 and called it Wag the Dog — a president fabricates a war to distract from a sex scandal involving a minor. That was satire. This is Saturday.

The United States is only isolated in this war. As Al Jazeera’s analysis noted, unlike Bush in 2003, Trump has no coalition. The UK refused to let the U.S. use its air bases. Only Israel is fully on board — because for Netanyahu, American firepower serves Israeli territorial ambitions, and for the evangelical base, Israeli territorial ambitions serve the prophecy.

Iran has spent 40 years preparing for exactly this fight. The terrain favors defense. The force ratios required for regime change dwarf anything currently deployed. The Strait of Hormuz gives Iran escalation options that could crater the global economy overnight.

Trump has started a war he can’t define, against a country he can’t occupy, with objectives he can’t articulate, on authorization he doesn’t have, all by design.

The people who actually want this modern day holy war want things that can’t be said out loud: annexation, crusade, rapture, and oil. The last time America went to war in the Middle East on false premises, it took twenty years and two trillion dollars to leave with nothing.

Iran is three times the size, three times the population, and has been preparing while waiting.

Palantir just sued Republik, a small Swiss magazine, for publishing investigative journalism based on 59 freedom of information requests. The reporting documented what the Swiss government already concluded: Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks to data sovereignty, and Swiss agencies rejected the company at least nine times.

Palantir does not disagree with the reporting. They’re invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute to force Palantir’s propaganda. A law designed to correct factual errors is being weaponized to compel a publication to run corporate marketing fluff.

This is classic Palantir information warfare, to cheat when they can’t win.

Truth Inversion Tactics

In 2016, Palantir knew their product wouldn’t be selected on its merits so they sued the U.S. Army in the Court of Federal Claims to force adoption. The company cynically invoked the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 — a law requiring agencies to consider buying products before building one. The Army at this point had spent over $3 billion developing DCGS-A, its intelligence analysis platform. Palantir argued the Army could not shut them out.

The court said the Army violated procurement law by building, which made little sense. The practical outcome was a total inversion of the law’s intent. The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act exists to prevent vendor lock-in and promote interoperability. Palantir used it to promote vendor lock-in and prevent interoperability.

Yeah, it’s as stupid as it sounds.

Gotham is one of the most proprietary, dependency-creating platforms in the defense sector. It was designed so that once your data, workflows, and analyst training live inside Palantir’s ecosystem, they don’t leave.

Just think of how bad the American Justice system has to be for a judge to rule that the way to prevent lock-in is to privatize lock-in.

The Swiss military identified this exact problem in the internal report that Republik published. Using Palantir’s software would increase unsafe dependence on a provider with Nazi origins, risk data leaving the country, and leave unclear who has access to data shared with the company. It’s a genuinely awful product. Which is why Palantir has fired up their legal team again.

We see the same structural logic today as before: invoke a law designed to protect a value, to instead destroy that value.

Element	U.S. Army (2016)	Swiss Republik (2025)
Law invoked	Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act	Swiss right-of-reply statute
Stated purpose of law	Prevent vendor lock-in; require open competition	Correct factual errors in reporting
Palantir’s claim	Army illegally excluded commercial alternatives	Magazine denied adequate right to respond
What Palantir actually sought	Forced adoption of its proprietary platform	Forced publication of its corporate messaging
Was the underlying claim factually contested?	No — Palantir didn’t dispute DCGS-A existed; argued process was illegal	No — Palantir doesn’t claim the reporting is false
Actual outcome vs. law’s intent	Anti-lock-in law produced lock-in	Error-correction law used to suppress accurate reporting
Target	Army procurement bureaucracy that couldn’t match Boies Schiller litigation	Small independent magazine that can’t match Palantir’s legal budget
Amplification strategy	Rep. Duncan Hunter ran Congressional interference; casualty stories filed in court	Streisand Effect now international via FT, European Federation of Journalists, UK Parliament

Propaganda Abuses a Grain of Truth

The inversion depends on the original principle being sound. Nobody argues against competition in procurement. Nobody argues against balance in press coverage. Palantir takes the principle and inverts it, a modern day “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Work is good, keeps you healthy, so here’s a work camp that murders you.

In the Army case, Palantir built its litigation around “curated” field testimony about the 82nd Airborne’s IED casualties, commanders allegedly requesting Palantir and being denied, DCGS-A systems “collecting dust.” This was advocacy, the opposite of evidence, amplified by a congressman dramatically shouting at Gen. Odierno in hearings. The Army’s own test evaluation reports were accused of being doctored to turn the accusation itself into the story, regardless of whether any evaluation supported it. Hitler notably made trials against him into a victimization complaint, inverting perception of his aggression into a campaign to enable it.

The court didn’t actually rule the Army failed to consider a useful product. It ruled the Army didn’t follow a procedure exactly. That narrow procedural victory became a crack that Palantir smashed open, grabbing an $800 million contract that forced permanent platform dependency.

In Switzerland, Palantir doesn’t need the platform that it claims to need. They published a blog post. They have access to every major media outlet and social platform on earth. The whole right-of-reply lawsuit is a bald-faced lie. They are forcing a small magazine to host Palantir’s lies under the threat of legal attack. The European Federation of Journalists called it what it is: a SLAPP suit.

Asymmetric Abuse

The Army’s procurement office was no match for Palantir’s heavily funded litigation team at Boies Schiller. Republik certainly can’t match the legal budget.

The inversion strategy requires the target to lack the resources to expose in court that the law is being used against its own purpose.

Capitulate to American billionaires or be sued into default is the choice Palantir’s aggressive legal strategy creates.

A company that brags about optimizing kill chains and whose CEO talks about scaring and occasionally killing enemies can’t handle a Swiss statistical office ignoring its emails, or a small magazine publishing government documents.

The pattern recognition software apparently has no shame, doesn’t flag self-inflicted reputational damage.

A Zurich court rules in March. Let’s see if they make the U.S. Army error. Whatever the outcome, the method is clearly documented. Palantir cheats by inversion: take a law built to protect openness, competition, or accountability, and use it to destroy exactly those things.