Iran strike factions (2026)
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Iran strike factions (2026) is John Kiriakou's account, sourced to a former CIA colleague who had been at the White House, of the internal fight over a 2026 decision to attack Iran. He reported the anti-war camp was led by Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, and the pro-war camp by Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and, strikingly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kiriakou noted that at the start of the Iraq war the Joint Chiefs had been the most anti-war voices, "because they know what war is", but that Trump had, over the prior year, fired every four-star general who had served under Biden and promoted loyalists. He lamented that this overrode the promising diplomacy the Omanis had brokered in Muscat and Geneva.

Netanyahu's collapse thesis and the sleeper-cell fabrication

Kiriakou has separately elaborated on why he believes Trump went along with the strike: Netanyahu had told him that killing Ayatollah Khamenei and the entire military and nuclear leadership in a decapitation strike would make the Iranian government collapse "like a house of cards", instead it "just kept going like nothing happened." He says Israeli intelligence passed to the CIA claiming Iranian sleeper-cell hit teams were positioned in American cities from Chicago to Honolulu was fabricated by Netanyahu to shift US public opinion toward the war, comparable, he says, to a forged intelligence report another liaison service gave the CIA about Iraq in 2002.

Kiriakou places the 2026 strike in a longer pattern: every Israeli prime minister since the mid-1980s asked every US president, from Ronald Reagan onward, to bomb Iran, and every one refused, "until this one." He says Barack Obama once refused the same request even after Netanyahu threatened Israel would use nuclear weapons, calling his bluff; people in Trump's circles told Kiriakou the identical dynamic played out with Trump, who then used the 30,000-lb MOAB "mother of all bombs" believing he was preventing an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran. He notes that after Trump killed Qassem Soleimani in his first term, Iran declined to retaliate militarily even as roughly 700,000 people attended Soleimani's funeral procession, a restraint scholars later termed "strategic patience."

Kiriakou has separately assessed that the unrest inside Iran during this period looks like a joint Mossad-CIA operation, noting that Mossad has bragged in the Israeli press about working with and lightly arming the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a formerly designated terrorist group, MEK operatives, in his account, set fire to mosques inside Iran and burned 38 fire trucks so the fires couldn't be extinguished.

Conscientious objectors, Hegseth, and the missing declaration of war

Kiriakou says he has personally fielded phone calls from soldiers ordered to deploy for the Iran war who do not want to go, and has referred some to Quaker House at Fort Bragg, a group that assists conscientious objectors; he separately notes 900,000 Lebanese are currently internally displaced amid renewed fighting. He says he does not believe Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's claim that troops told him to "finish the job," and relays that Judge Napolitano, who co-hosted a Fox show with Hegseth for ten years, described him to Kiriakou as "a nice guy, but he's an incompetent boob and a serial killer."

Kiriakou contrasts the administration's inconsistent public rationale for the war with the Iraq War, when George W. Bush at least maintained a single consistent justification while crisscrossing the country for months to build support. He also notes Congress has not formally declared war since December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, despite the Constitution requiring one.

No plan, and '565,000 versus 2,500' (Consortium News)

John Kiriakou contrasts the 2026 strike on Iran with real war preparation: in 2003 the U.S. spent ten months building staffs and lining up allies through "burden sharing," and in 1990 sent 565,000 troops and six carrier strike groups to the Gulf. This time there was "no plan," just two carriers, some 22 ships and an expeditionary force of 2,500 Marines that could do "almost nothing except protect embassies", a "joke" against a country the size of Western Europe with 92 million people. He predicts Trump will simply "declare victory and go home," leaving the wreckage for the next president, and warns Iran will now seek a nuclear weapon, "we're not talking about North Korea right now" because North Korea has one.

See also

- Marco Rubio
- Tulsi Gabbard
- Iran 12-Day War
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
- Reza Pahlavi
