The Words Behind the War
June 25, 2025·32 comments
The US dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21st, 2025, but the decision to enter that war wasn't made on June 21st. Narrative analysis of millions of news articles reveals a five-month pattern of coordinated story-telling that maps precisely onto classified military planning. What looked like ongoing diplomacy was simultaneous with systematic preparation for conflict, invisible not because it was hidden, but because we've learned not to see it.
- Governments don't decide to wage war in situation rooms during crises. The decision for Iran was likely made around April 27th when nuclear talks in Oman failed, with the preceding three months spent positioning military assets and building narrative support while public communications continued signaling openness to diplomacy.
- Narrative mobilization follows a precise timeline. The five core war rationales showed steady increase through spring, peaked in late April, then exploded after Israel's June 12th air campaign, reaching unprecedented 8-standard-deviation spikes in media density.
- One narrative has been constant for years while others appear only when war is imminent. "Iran is days away from a nuke" shows up equally in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2025 regardless of actual threat levels, while prescriptive narratives like "cannot be allowed" only surge when military action is planned.
- The difference between describing Iran as evil and saying it cannot have nukes matters enormously. Descriptive narratives don't mobilize public support for action, but prescriptive ones do, which is why you see the same semantic patterns before every actual military initiation but not during periods of mere political tension.
- The next signal to watch is regime change rhetoric. After months of absence, "Iran needs regime change" spiked to unusual levels in the ten days following the bombing, which Hunt identifies as the key indicator that US war aims are about to escalate significantly beyond the nuclear facilities strike.
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