The Words Behind the War

Last Wednesday, June 18_th, three days before the US dropped ‘bunker-buster’ bombs and fired Tomahawk missiles on Iranian nuclear facilities, I posted on Twitter that it looked to me like the decision to enter the Iran-Israel war had already been made, and that all the talk of diplomatic-this and two-weeks-that was just for show.

Today I want to show you why I thought that.

I want to show you what ‘mobilizing narrative support’ looks like, as measured by our revolutionary Perscient technology and as understood by someone who has spent the past 35 years studying, writing and teaching about this stuff.

I think we all recognize how much planning and preparation goes into the important, risky decisions of our personal lives, like getting married or choosing a college or finding a job, and it’s weird to me that we often don’t seem to recognize that governments, companies and institutions do an immense amount of planning and preparation for their important, risky decisions, too. I suppose we’ve been trained by a Hollywood version of decision making, especially White House decision making a la Aaron Sorkin, where President Bartlett gathers his team in the Situation Room and through a series of penetrating questions and keen historical observations is able to either avert nuclear Armageddon or launch a delicate military counter-maneuver that opens the door for a diplomatic solution, all in the course of a single tense evening, despite some trigger-happy generals and a ticking clock of some sort.

This just isn’t the way this stuff works. Particularly when it comes to going to war, which is pretty much the riskiest thing that any set of national leaders can undertake from a domestic political perspective, making that initial move is something that is discussed and planned, in the immortal words of Pete Hegseth, for months and weeks.

“This is a plan that took months and weeks of positioning and preparation, so that we could be ready when the president of the United States called. It took a great deal of precision. It involved misdirection and the highest of operational security.”― Pete Hegseth, June 22_nd Pentagon briefing

And that’s just the go-decision. The war plans themselves, like in this case, have typically been in the works for years.

There was nothing ‘imminent’ about the Iranian nuclear threat, no matter what Mike Johnson and other GOP Congressional apologists for scrapping the War Powers Act might say, at least when their guy is in the White House. Or certainly not imminent in the sense of a Jack Bauer 24 episode.

No, the way this stuff works is that you start to think that a military initiation or escalation might be necessary three or four months before you decide to actually go for it, and you let your generals and admirals know that they should dust off the plans and the options that they’ve been keeping on file somewhere. At this point you’re just thinking seriously about it and there are lots of discussions and lots of back-channeling and lots of debate. Maybe it happens and maybe it doesn’t, but there’s an inertia to this process so I’d say that something happens more times than not. The actual decision to initiate is made four or five weeks before the Marines land or the bombs drop or whatever, and then you spend those four or five weeks getting everything into position. Arranging your military assets is a big part of that four to five week preparation time, but an equally important part is arranging your Narrative assets – your influence over media coverage of the rationale for war. That said, it’s important not to peak too soon with your war-drum beating, so while you’ve been building the narrative case throughout the entire process, even when you were just thinking seriously about it, you only start the go-to-war media blitz a week or two before the actual fighting starts.

The narrative record of our attack on Iran is a perfect example of this prototypical getting-to-war experience.

Go-to-War Iran Narratives in Trump II Administration, January 20 – June 20, 2025 (z-scored)

You’re looking at a 5-month chart of the semantic density of five go-to-war rationales (what we call semantic signatures) [1] concerning Iran, as measured across millions of news articles, blogs and transcripts. The vertical y-axis shows the cumulative ‘z-scores’ of these five go-to-war narratives, which is best interpreted as a measure of how unusual this level of media activity and semantic density is. A z-score is the equivalent of a standard deviation measure, so when you see that ‘The time for diplomacy is over’ narrative has a z-score of 8 over the past week and a half, that means it is an 8-standard deviation event … i.e. a one-of-a-kind event.

What you’re seeing in this chart is a