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From last year: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-war-hawks-arent-even-trying-to-persuade-us-anymore

The United States is at war with Iran. On Saturday night, President Donald Trump announced that U.S. warplanes had struck three nuclear sites in Iran and suggested more strikes might be ahead. The next day, he began calling for “regime change.” Despite Trump’s attempts to posture as a peacemaker, it was an escalation many of us knew was coming. Neoconservatives have been chasing the holy grail of war with Iran for decades, and at long last they got Trump to reach out his sweaty orange mitts and grab it for them. The most unsettling part is that it felt as if this outcome was always inevitable.

In recent weeks, there have been many comparisons made between the lead-up to this war and George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. In many ways, that comparison is apt. Iran is another oil-rich Middle Eastern country we’ve accused of building weapons of mass destruction based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. And yet there is one key difference. In order to carry out the Iraq War—which ended up being the worst crime of the 21st century, leaving the region in tatters and more than half a million dead—the Bush administration undertook a mammoth effort to manufacture consent from the public. Despite tens of millions still marching in protest, it worked. At the dawn of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 72 percent of Americans supported the invasion, according to a Gallup poll. Trump’s war, on the other hand, is deeply unpopular, but he has made far less of an effort to persuade skeptics. Without strong anti-war institutions to oppose him, he may believe he doesn’t need to.