Echoes of Iraq: Mainstream media ‘deja vu’ over framing of the war on Iran
“Why we should go to war” ran the headline of a Guardian article in February 2003 by the commentator Julie Burchill.
In it, she explained to the Guardian’s liberal readers why a pro-war attitude in the run-up to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq should be welcomed.
“If you really think it's better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you're really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise,” wrote Burchill.
Another article published in April 2003, after the invasion started, criticised anti-war “doomsters”, claiming “the people of Iraq have been unchained from appalling torture and tyranny” as a result of US-UK action.
Despite claims of the BBC’s anti-war bias from Downing Street, academic analysis proved that it was in fact more reliant on government and military sources than other sources.
It was also the least likely to quote sources of Iraqi or independent origin, such as the Red Cross, which might contradict official narratives that underplayed Iraqi casualties.
Two decades after Iraq, how much has changed?
Many media outlets have issued mea culpas for their parroting of US and British propaganda lines in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq but when it comes to the latest conflict in Iran, it seems clear that that introspection did not lead to lasting change.
Media analysts Middle East Eye spoke to say that once again the media is failing in its coverage of the current US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
Coverage by news outlets is perhaps more tentative in its support for war given the lessons editors have learnt after Iraq, but many of the same issues keep turning up.
Leaving out unflattering details
The bombardment of Iran by Israel and Washington has already led to more than 1200 deaths, including 165 people, almost all schoolchildren aged between seven and 12, killed by US “double-tap” strikes on a school.
Such strikes are designed to take out medics and civilians arriving at the scene to help victims in a delayed double explosion.
Declassified UK reported a Scottish weapons factory helped to make missiles allegedly used in the attack, which the UN education agency, Unesco, described as a “grave violation of international law”.
So far, no mainstream media have reported on this UK link to the attack.
Instead media outlets have repeatedly raised doubts about who was behind the attack.
One BBC headline from 28 February read “At least 153 dead after reported strike on school, Iran says”.
Analysts have pointed out the use of the passive voice, lack of a named aggressor, and implication of doubt regarding the reliability of the source.
It was a New York Times report that first revealed the US as the likely culprits behind the attack - a conclusion that has since become firmer as evidence comes out, despite Washington’s reluctance to accept responsibility.
Elsewhere, Sky News called Iran’s bombing of Israel a “horror story”, but has avoided the use of similar language to describe the plight of Iranians living under US bombardment.
An article in The Telegraph justified US-Israeli attacks by accusing critics of “erasing the history of the regime’s terror”.
Nonetheless, this time round the lack of a persuasive reason for the war from the Trump administration has meant a break from the cohesive media narrative that accompanied the Iraq war.
According to Ali Alavi, lecturer in Middle Eastern and Iranian Studies at SOAS, while the 2003 invasion of Iraq followed the “shock of 9/11, when much of the western political class and media converged around a single security narrative about Saddam Hussein”, the response to the war on Iran “appears much more fragmented”.
He said that the coverage is “less uniformly aligned with political messaging” with a “lack of consensus” around the framing and justification for the war.
Part of this stems from the fact that the Trump administration has been characteristically chaotic in establishing the aims of the war: with conflicting narratives around “regime change”, preventing nuclear capabilities and taking out an immediate threat.
WMDs and other lies
During the lead-up to the Iraq War, press reporting repeated the so-called “45-minute claim” on how long it would take Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to reach the UK.
Most notably, the Sun ran a sensationalist headline “Brits 45 mins from doom” following the publication of the September 2002 dossier which served as justification for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq the following year.
Similarly, The Sunday Telegraph pumped out headlines like “UN inspectors uncover proof of Saddam’s nuclear bomb plans” and “UN gives Iraq last chance to disarm” to pave the way for the illegal invasion.
'The clear fact is that the media do not represent these [anti-war] views and cater overwhelmingly to the most hawkish voices in government'
- Des Freeman, Goldsmiths University
The BBC was attacked by Blair’s government for raising concerns that the intelligence dossier about Iraq’s WMDs had been “sexed up” by the prime minister’s office.
The subsequent fallout led to resignations from the BBC’s chairman and director general.
However, the publication of the Chilcot report in 2016 later vindicated their claims that Blair and his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
The inquiry found Iraq posed “no imminent threat” and British intelligence agencies had produced “flawed information” about the alleged WMDs.
Fast forward to 2026 and Israeli officials are claiming they launched a “pre-emptive attack against Iran” while Trump cited an “imminent threat” to the US, despite Pentagon briefings directly contradicting the narrative that Iran would strike unprovoked.
The claims that Iran poses an existential threat have been repeated in British mainstream media and Iran's supposed nuclear weapons ambitions are spoken of as a matter of fact.
For example, The Times ran a story on Thursday with the headline “How close is Iran to building a nuclear weapon?”
“US-Israeli attacks are targeting Tehran’s atomic programme once more, suggesting Trump’s bunker-busting bombs last year did not entirely obliterate the threat,” the article continues.
What the article fails to mention is that Iran had just made major concessions in settlements regarding its nuclear programme.
Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who has been mediating the process, told CBS News that negotiators from the US and Iran had made “substantial progress” and that a nuclear “deal is within our reach”, just one day before the US and Israel attacked the region.
Iran agreed to blend existing stockpiles of enriched uranium to their “lowest level possible” and grant inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “full access” to its nuclear sites.
Meanwhile, Israel refuses to acknowledge its own nuclear programme, has rejected IAEA inspections, and, unlike Iran, is not part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Rarely mentioned is the fact that western states have been intervening in the region, including militarily, before weapons of mass destruction were ever an issue.
In 1953, US and British intelligence operatives organised a coup against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalised Iran’s oil.
The Shah’s rule was strengthened and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP) resumed its control of Iranian oil.
The CIA also helped overthrow Iraq’s president, Abdul-Karim Qasim, the general who deposed the western-allied Iraqi monarchy, in a 1963 coup.
When the Shah was overthrown during the 1979 Iranian revolution, the US backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, providing arms and intelligence to fight the newly anti-western Iran. Britain and Germany supplied Saddam with equipment and materials for the manufacture of chemical weapons during the war.
When Saddam Hussein no longer supported western interests and became the new bete noire by invading Kuwait in 1990, the US led a war against Iraq.
Embedded journalists
Catriona Pennell, professor of Modern History and Memory Studies at Exeter, told MEE that, in 2003, during “a perceived moment of crisis, the press tended to support the national cause… transmitting information on behalf of governments, rather than acting as a critical filter.”
Media analysts found that less than 10 percent of news stories covering the Iraq war featured controversial issues such as “civilian casualties and antiwar protest”.
'The camera-angle is from Israel and from Washington rather than Iran'
- Gholam Khiabany, Goldsmiths, University of London
Under six percent focused on “the rationale for war”, with the vast majority of reporting being “event-driven” by “embedded journalists” accompanying military personnel on the ground.
For academic Gholam Khiabany, who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, the fact that the media are reporting on Iran largely from inside Tel Aviv is telling.
“The camera-angle is from Israel and from Washington rather than Iran,” he explained, likening it to the media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which emphasised death toll figures came from the “Hamas-run health ministry” to imply they were unreliable.
According to Philip Seib, professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, while “cinematic but simplistic news coverage bolstered the early support for the invasion” in Iraq, the argument of “Iran as an existential threat to the United States exists only in the troubled brain of Donald Trump”.
Opposition to the Iraq war grew steadily, culminating in the two-million-person march in February 2003 organised by Stop the War.
Public scepticism
Lindsey German, co-founder of Stop the War, which recently organised the 50,000-strong London demonstration against attacks on Iran on Saturday, said that the Independent and the Daily Mirror were the only major British outlets to highlight widespread opposition to the Iraq war.
The aftermath of Iraq – British military losses, vast Iraqi civilian casualties, the absence of WMDs – has contributed to a more cautious response from Keir Starmer, whose popularity is lower than even Blair’s worst moments.
“The legacy of Iraq weighs very heavily on the Labour government,” German told MEE, noting Starmer frames support for US and Israeli attacks as being for “defensive purposes”, despite criticism from both Blair and Trump.
Trump is also a much less credible source when it comes to justifying bombing civilians in the name of Iranian women’s freedom, given his extensive ties to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, track record of misogynistic comments, and allegations of sexual assault involving underage girls.
While the media might maintain a lot of the narrative cohesion that accompanied the Iraq War, the same cannot be said about the general public in both the US and UK.
Recent YouGov polling indicates that a majority (59 percent) of the British public oppose US military action against Iran and only eight percent want the UK “actively joining” attacks.
More than half of Americans also oppose the war on Iran, with opposition to the use of ground troops rising to 74 percent, according to the pollster Quinnipiac.
Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths University, told MEE “the clear fact is that the media do not represent these views and cater overwhelmingly to the most hawkish voices in government”.
These voices he said issue “a cacophony of noise that we have to move to a war footing and increase the defence budget, even if that means shredding public services”.
The chaos surrounding Trump has “allowed sections of the media to report more critically and to focus on the lack of military planning on the part of the US, justifying the UK not playing a more defensive role”.
Nevertheless, Freedman noted, as with Iraq, “very few journalists ask the key questions about how any of this can be justified in international law.”
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https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/echoes-iraq-mainstream-media-deja-vu-over-framing-war-iran
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