WaPo-Meinung: Iran-Krieg: „Wir erleben den ersten Alternativkrieg: einen Konflikt, in dem der online geführte Krieg und der in der Realität geführte Krieg so völlig auseinanderklaffen, dass sie genauso gut auf verschiedenen Planeten stattfinden könnten.“
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/27/israel-iran-war-propaganda-disinformation/
12 Kommentare
[Non-paywall link](https://archive.is/20260328055607/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/27/israel-iran-war-propaganda-disinformation/#selection-385.0-385.199)
Sure thing, WaPo opinion author. It’s not like we had the same thing happening with the Russia-Ukraine war that could have given us some insights about this particular topic.
> …Why do otherwise intelligent people send me AI-generated videos and refuse to believe my firsthand account?
> “They don’t want this to work,” he said. “They want it to fail.” Analysts in the U.S., he explained, “cannot have it that Trump and Bibi are the ones defending the West.”
> People send me these videos because they need me to confirm what they need to be true.
> This is the defining feature of the alt-war. It is not that people lack information, but that the success of the war conflicts with their priors and so they have constructed an alternative war…
Well said.
So, everything is fine and this is going well for the US? Israel is completely justified in their attacks? Maybe I’m just online too much but this sure looks like a giant mess littered with war crimes to me.
> Iranian options are narrowing to outcomes that all leave Israel better positioned than before, whether that is regime change in Tehran, a negotiated arrangement under American pressure or a ceasefire along the lines of the Houthi deal.
Or they can bomb the infraestructure of the gulf countries creating thousands of refugees. Look is the war going quite as bad as portrayed in reddit? Probably not. Is the war going well? Not at all sure the Iranian regime is weakened but it isn’t even willing to negotiate outside of maximalist demands yet and the only way the US seems to have to bring them to the table is further escalation that will risk long term damage to the gulf nations. And if the markets are the thing that determines of the war is going well then the S&P 500 has been going down since this began
Wow, the author is a completely objective and unbiased commentator writing for a notoriously objective and unbiased publicly-owned media house – we can absolutely take her and her sources at face value.
What a joke.
The war is not going that well if you read mainstream objective press either (no the Opinion section of the Bezos Post doesn’t count). Was Rubio admitting yesterday that Iran may end up in permanent control of the Hormuz strait even after the war ends AI misinformation too?
This alt-article is so alt-stupid. This is the same war.
Two things can be true simultaneously for the US. One, that this war at a tactical level has been an almost utter and complete success for the US. Incredibly low levels of KIA, no ships sunk, no manned aircraft shot down, etc. Two, this war at a strategic level has been an almost utter and complete failure in any one of the dozen different goals the administration has scrambled to use to justify this conflict.
I’m glad he’s making these points.
No matter what it is important to remember that online is not the real world and that there are always multiple actors trying to vie for your attention and your belief.
Another Washington Post puppet show
The Syrian Civil War was kind of like this in the 2010s but not as bad mostly because it wasn’t part of the culture war as much and Twitter played less of a role in American’s news diet. The first conflict I really noticed the rise of widespread motivated „Stan-culture like reality denial“ + Sloptainment news was Nargono-Karabakh. It was also a problem with Ukraine, but things really went off the deep end after Musk took over. That said by 2024 this kind of hyper-partisan slop war following was the norm not the exception and Ukraine/Gaza became this long before Iran did.