In early reporting on the Iran War as “the ultimate war of choice,” the New York Times spoke, as usual, in the sanitizing language of political realism. This is the lingua franca of the foreign policy elite in the Atlanticist alliance, consisting of the self-anointed ‘liberal democracies.’ It is definitely a more refined and less objectionable manner of labeling an unprovoked ‘war of aggression’ than the brazen utterances of the U.S. president, Donald Trump, who had the audacity to trivialize the bloodshed and devastation traumatizing Iran’s innocent population as ‘an excursion.’