All US wars have been based on lies and deceptions: Analyst

All US wars have been based on lies and deceptions, and the administration of President Donald Trump is provoking another unjustified conflict with Iran, says an academic and political analyst in California.

“In the past, the lies that got the US into wars where purposefully deceptive and took time to be exposed,” said Dennis Etler, a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.

“The escalation of the War in Vietnam was based on the Tonkin Gulf incident when it was alleged that North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked a US naval vessel. It took years before the incident was shown to have been fabricated as a rationale for bombing North Vietnam and sending hundreds of thousands of troops to wage war against the Vietnamese people, killing millions,” Etler said in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

“The invasion of Iraq was justified because of its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), a charge that was later found to have been concocted based on faked intelligence. It took months for that deception to be revealed, but the dirty deed had been done and millions of Iraqis faced the consequences,” Etler said.

“Now, as presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has said, the lies are coming fast and furious as the US provokes conflict with Iran with the prospect of a full-fledged war in the offing. But the lies and deceptions of Trump and his underlings are being exposed not in years, months or days but as soon as they are uttered,” he added.

'Lying' Trump could spark war with Iran: Bernie Sanders

Bernard Sanders has said he is concerned that Trump is peddling lies that could spark a war with Iran which would be worse than the Iraq War.

Sanders, a US Senator from Vermont, said Tuesday he is concerned that President Donald Trump is peddling lies that could spark a war with Iran which would be worse than the Iraq War.

“What we have to face as a nation is that the two great foreign policy disasters of our lifetimes were the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. Both of those wars were based on lies,” Sanders said at the Democratic presidential primary debate.

“And right now, what I fear very much is we have a president who is lying again and could drag us into a war that is even worse than the war in Iraq,” he added.

Sanders, who has surged in state and national polls in the race for the White House, has opposed the Iraq War and is speaking against the Trump administration’s warmongering against Iran.

Tensions between the US and Iran have skyrocketed in recent weeks after the US military carried out an airstrike on the order of Trump at Baghdad’s international airport January 3, assassinating General Qassem Soleimani and the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, as well as eight other companions.

Iran responded by launching missiles at Iraqi military bases that house US troops.

US officials have made confusing remarks about what prompted Trump to order the assassination.

“The US … has become so corrupted that even when the lies and deceptions are transparent for all the world to see they are simply shrugged off as inconsequential by their perpetrators,” Etler said.

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