The Iran War has nothing to do with Epstein
Conspiracy theorists are determined to find the sex-abusing financier at the root of everything.
With war comes conspiracy. Back in 1991, those claiming to be in the know argued that the first Gulf War was all about oil. ‘If Iraq grew carrots, America would not be interested’, they told anyone who cared to listen. Yet this simplistic reasoning seems positively intellectual when compared to the popular explanation for the current war in the Middle East. ‘Iran has been bombed to distract us all from the Epstein files’, is the line now being delivered with a conspiratorial wink.
Saturday Night Live, the popular American sketch show, kicked off last weekend’s episode with a skit featuring President Trump, played by comedian James Austin Johnson. ‘As we all know, Iran has been two weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon for like the last 15 years or something, so we had to act now’, Johnson deadpans. Then he concludes: ‘War, what is it good for? Distracting from the Epstein files!’ Funny? Perhaps. Yet it is not just comedians who hold this view.
Republican representative Thomas Massie has taken to X with his own public-service announcement: ‘Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away.’ Massie is echoing Christopher S Chivvis, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has claimed in the Guardian that Trump is gambling on attention-grabbing explosions shifting the news agenda away from Epstein and tariffs. ‘The strikes function as a classic “diversionary war”’, he wrote, ‘an attempt to hijack the global narrative and drown out domestic scandal with the thunder of cruise missiles’. British American journalist Mehdi Hasan concurs: ‘It’s 100 per cent true that Epstein is a factor in all this.’ Is it ‘Operation Epic Fury [the American military’s codename for its attack on Iran] or Operation Epstein Distraction?’, ponders an Australian publication.
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