The idea that the only alternative to signing a bad deal with Iran is World War III is right out of the playbook of Barack Obama and John Kerry.

Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night took aim at Mark Levin, claiming in a rant on X that Levin had visited the White House and was “lobbying for war with Iran.” There are a lot of dishonest and preposterous claims made in the post, and obviously Levin is more than capable of defending himself. But to give you an idea of how ridiculous he is being, Carlson wrote that Levin had “no plans to fight in this or any other war.” The “chicken hawk” argument is always a diversion, because it suggests that nobody can have an opinion on matters of war and peace if they aren’t ready to be deployed; further, it’s not as if Carlson’s opinion on the matter would be any different if a member of the military were the one disagreeing with him on Iran. But it’s especially absurd to direct the charge not against a pundit of military age but against Levin, who is old enough to have served in the Reagan administration. 

Carlson also makes a number of inaccurate statements. He claims that “there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb, or has plans to.” Yet, as reported by the BBC (hardly a Zionist source), the International Atomic Energy Agency found that “Iran now possesses over 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity — well above the level used for civilian purposes and close to weapons grade, and a near 50% increase in three months. It is enough for about 10 nuclear weapons if further refined, making Iran the only non nuclear-armed state producing uranium at this level.”

But instead of doing a point-by-point rebuttal, I’d like to focus on something I’d call the “reverse-Munich phenomenon.” It has become popular to make fun of hawks, in responding to foreign adversaries, for too often invoking Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 “peace in our time” agreement with Adolf Hitler in Munich. I try to avoid this parallel myself, because I think there is always a danger in drawing comparisons between different situations from different times and find it better to focus on the merits of the arguments in each given situation. What’s ironic is that the pro-restraint crowd is doing exactly what they accuse hawks of doing — only swapping in Iraq for Munich. That is, if their caricature is that hawks see every foreign adversary as the next Hitler bent on world conquest, the reality is that restrainers are treating any sort of muscular approach to foreign policy as the next Iraq War.

“So why is Mark Levin once again hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction?” asks Carlson, invoking the memory of Iraq. “To distract you from the real goal, which is regime change — young Americans heading back to the Middle East to topple yet another government.” Carlson goes on to predict that “the first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans,” and that, as the imaginary war goes on, “an attack on Iran could very easily become a world war. We’d lose.” 

But advocates of allowing Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with help from the U.S., are in no way advocating anything on the scale of the Iraq War, with hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground invading the country, occupying it, toppling the government, and attempting to set up a liberal democracy. What the hawks are talking about is much closer to Israel’s 1981 Osirak attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. 

Carlson offers two contrasting portraits of Iran. On one hand, he describes Iran as a nation that poses no threat and argues that there is no reason to fear its gaining nuclear weapons. On the other hand, he warns that its “fearsome arsenal of ballistic missiles” would kill thousands of American troops in a week, and that ultimately, we’d lose a war against the country. Yet Carlson has everything backwards. Right now, Iran is vulnerable. It fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel on two separate occasions, but thanks to Israeli and U.S. missile defense systems and the help of regional partners, there was barely any damage. Last October, Israel launched retaliatory strikes against Iran that crippled its missile production and damaged much of its anti-aircraft capability without losing a single aircraft. So there is now a window to destroy Iran’s nuclear program (or at least deal it a severe setback). If Iran were allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, however, it would become much more capable of threatening U.S. military assets in the region and much more immune to any sort of military action.

This isn’t the first time that Carlson has issued paranoid warnings about Iranian retaliation. After President Trump successfully ordered the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, Carlson claimed that the attack had put the U.S. on the “brink of war.” At the time, he also invoked the Iraq example, stating of those who favored Trump’s action, “These are the same people who lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction way back in 2002, and by doing that, got us into an utterly pointless war that dramatically weakened our country. The people pushing conflict with Iran are the same people who did that.” 

Again, nobody other than Carlson and his allies are arguing that the U.S. is going to use the Iraq War as a model for military action against Iran. As things currently stand, Iran is marching toward a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has rejected Trump’s demand that it abandon uranium enrichment. Carlson’s position, in effect, is that Trump should cave in to Iran’s demands on enrichment. Carlson likes to portray himself as an opponent of the elites, but the idea of negotiating with Iran rather than striking its nuclear program militarily is as close as you can get to elite Washington consensus opinion. In fact, the idea that the only alternative to signing a bad deal with Iran is World War III is a false choice that is right out of the playbook of Barack Obama and John Kerry.