![\"Pete](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-2263873066_42b949.jpg?fit=4000%2C2667\")
The United States<\/span> is waging a religious war. This is, at least, how dozens of fanatical U.S. military commanders understand President Donald Trump\u2019s illegal assault on Iran: a messianic battle to bring about Jesus Christ\u2019s return.<\/p>\n \u201cPresident Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,\u201d one military commander told his combat unit, which could be deployed to fight in Iran \u201cat any moment,\u201d according to a complaint reportedly filed<\/a> by one of the unit\u2019s officers to a military watchdog group.<\/p>\n The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it has been \u201cinundated\u201d with more than 200 calls across dozens of military installations, including 110 complaints filed between Saturday morning and Monday evening, from service members reporting their commanders have invoked similar extremist rhetoric of Christian Zionist messianism when justifying the unprovoked war on Iran.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The complaints, which were first reported<\/a> by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen and have garnered international media<\/a> attention<\/a>, offer disturbing insight into the eschatology driving this murderous operation for a significant number of military leaders. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth is an open evangelical Christian nationalist who has remade military leadership to align with his extremist worldview.<\/p>\n It would be a mistake, though, to take these chilling end times invocations as some skeleton key to understanding the foundational, undergirding reason behind Trump\u2019s reckless death-dealing in Iran. The U.S. and Israel-led decimation of the Middle East region is overdetermined; too many causes, all reprehensible, account for Trump\u2019s waging war. To properly understand Trumpian fascism is to not reduce one cause to another, but to appreciate how they function in a chaotic constellation. Factors at play include: annihilatory Christian Zionism; Israel\u2019s genocidal Zionist project of territorial dominance<\/a>; the American president\u2019s unrestrained and irrepressible narcissism and drive to be a Great Man of history, idiocy, and miscalculation; and the continuity of bipartisan willingness to shed Arab and Muslim blood in the service of flailing U.S. hegemony.<\/p>\n All of these factors have played a part in previous illegal U.S. assaults on the Middle East, albeit to different degrees. As Larsen, the journalist, noted, President George W. Bush \u201creferred to the American \u2018crusade\u2019 against terrorism\u201d to justify his forever wars. Still, the open<\/em> Christian extremism of Hegseth\u2019s military leadership marks a certain shift. So, too, does the extremity of Trump\u2019s derangement and self-regard. But Islamophobic blood lust, the framework of civilizational clash between Judeo-Christian forces and Islamist threats, and an arrogant and foolish U.S. leadership are not new, even if the worst elements are now heightened and unvarnished by earlier myths of spreading democracy and nation-building.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n