Finally, an Anti-Woke War
This article appears in the April 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.
When I was an 18-year-old protesting the impending war on Iraq, I had my reasons: Saddam Hussein didn’t do 9/11, Dick Cheney was in it for oil, and yes, there was simply too much diversity in the Bush administration.
You see, when I got arrested outside of the United Nations, it wasn’t because Colin Powell was lying about evidence of weapons of mass destruction. It was because he was Black. As we all know, our enemies don’t respect diversity, equity, and inclusion, and they are too primitive to understand our concept of tokenism as a diversion. (And he wasn’t even a token because we also had Condoleezza Rice! *faints onto a divan*) Plus, there’s no greater sign of weakness than asking permission. Which is exactly what Powell was doing at the U.N. What’s the point of being the strongest country in the world when you still need a hall pass to kill other people’s leaders?
More from Francesca Fiorentini
So of course I was thrilled when 23 years later, a far less diverse, AI-generated reboot of the Bush administration decided to invade Iran, Iraq’s hotter and more successful sister. It’s the kind of arm candy worth losing your life savings—or your life—over.
This time, things will be different. Because Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has stated loud and clear that this Middle East intervention will finally refuse to be woke. As he put it himself, the U.S. war on Iran will have “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.”
Yes! At last, no more gender-neutral burn pits, no more pre-bombing land acknowledgments, no more prohibitions on kamikaze missions because of fears about cultural appropriation. And nobody will mock you when you’re unable to locate Iran on a map. Maps are r*tarded. And thanks to Pete Hegseth, I can say that.
We need a war that can sit around and podcast with the other wars that the woke mob tried to cancel: Iraq, Vietnam, Wounded Knee.
I’ll never forget where I was when I saw the images of torture out of Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Imagine my embarrassment when learning that a woman had the privilege of carrying out the heroic act of parading around a grown man on a leash. In Hegseth’s torture camps, only men will be allowed to waterboard in order to extract useless information from innocent civilians. Women will only be involved in the Iran war for cooking, cleaning, and asking for directions.
When one reflects on the Iraq War, or Afghanistan for that matter, every analyst would agree that it was really too organized and ended too quickly. Organization is a soy boy task that no army of alpha males should concern themselves with. And alpha males never pull out quickly. They let it drag on and on.
In Iraq, there was an overreliance on woke ideologies like stability and safety, and too many “day after” plans, like which religious faction to sic on which other religious faction. Plans are effeminate. Forget the day after. Let’s Carpe Bomb Diem!
The lesson from the Iraq War wasn’t to obey “rules of engagement” and refrain from indiscriminate killing like the Nisour Square massacre, it was to not let transgender people like Chelsea Manning near IT. Trans people have a far too humanity-oriented disposition and can’t be trusted to lie. Thankfully, Pete Hegseth has retired transgender service members and spared the military their morals. And by the way, there’s a reason that America’s first target in Iran was a girls’ school. It’s because both Hegseth and the Taliban agree: Women have no business getting an education.
At the end of the day, woke wars are for losers. And when it comes to the war with Iran, I personally want to be the opposite of woke. I would like to be asleep. Deeply asleep. Maybe even dreaming … of a completely different world.
The post Finally, an Anti-Woke War appeared first on The American Prospect.