Here is a humanized summary of the Iranian spokesman’s statement, expanded into a reflective six-paragraph essay.
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There are moments in history when the truth becomes a casualty of the very stories we tell ourselves to survive. The recent statement from Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baqaei cuts to the heart of this tragedy, stripping away the polished jargon of geopolitics to reveal something far older and more sinister. In a post on X, accompanied by a video chronicling decades of American and Israeli covert actions, Baqaei distilled the entire logic of modern political warfare into a single, devastating sentence: “False flags are an old craft: manufacture the incident, assign the blame, and harvest the consequences.” There is something almost folkloric about this phrasing, as if he were describing an ancient art passed down through generations of power brokers. And in a sense, he is. The false flag is not a new invention; it is a recurring nightmare, a pattern of deception that has been refined, industrialized, and weaponized across the past seventy years. Baqaei’s words remind us that behind every manufactured crisis lies a cold calculation—a decision to treat human suffering as raw material for political gain. The video he shared is not merely a list of grievances; it is an indictment, a visual testimony to the ways in which the powerful have repeatedly lit the match, pointed the finger, and then stepped back to watch the flames consume the innocent.
To understand the weight of Baqaei’s statement, we must first grasp the mechanics of the false flag. It is a technique as simple as it is monstrous: an actor commits an act of violence or sabotage, disguises the attack as the work of an enemy, and then uses the resulting outrage to justify a predetermined response—war, sanctions, surveillance, or the erosion of civil liberties. The history of this practice is long and stained with blood, spanning continents and decades. From the Lavon Affair in 1950s Egypt, where Israeli operatives bombed Western targets to frame Arab nationalists, to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that helped propel the United States deeper into Vietnam, the pattern repeats with chilling regularity. Baqaei’s video, no doubt, draws a straight line from these older episodes to more recent controversies, painting a picture of two governments that have, in his telling, perfected the art of the lie. The purpose of such operations is always the same: to manufacture consent for actions that would otherwise be unthinkable. A population that would never support an aggressive war might, however, support a defensive retaliation against a perceived attack. And so the attack must be faked, the victim must be cast as the villain, and the real perpetrators must remain hidden behind a curtain of patriotic outrage. It is a deception that works because it plays on the most primal human instincts—fear, anger, and the desperate need to make sense of chaos.
The current context of Baqaei’s warning is impossible to ignore. Tensions between Iran and the United States and Israel have simmered for decades, but they have now reached a boiling point. As the spokesman notes, the American and international public is weary—exhausted by endless wars, distrustful of official narratives, and increasingly skeptical of the promises of their leaders. This wariness is a powerful obstacle for those who seek a new conflict. In the past, governments could rely on a credulous press and a frightened population to march obediently toward war. Today, after the catastrophic intelligence failures that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, the public has learned to ask harder questions. This makes the task of the aggressor more difficult, but not impossible. When honest justifications fail, Baqaei argues, the false flag becomes the last refuge of the desperate. He describes this dynamic with a strikingly human metaphor: “In a world where the American and international public is weary of an unlawful war of aggression against Iran, and where the aggressors have no honest way to justify a war of choice, even a raft made of lies can look like salvation to those who are drowning.” The image is haunting—a drowning man clutching at a fragile raft, knowing it is made of lies but grabbing it anyway because the alternative is to sink. This is the tragedy of modern propaganda: it does not need to be convincing; it only needs to be more bearable than the truth. For leaders who have backed themselves into a corner, who have promised action and delivered only failure, the false flag offers a way out—a chance to transform their own weakness into a manufactured crisis that demands a violent response.
What makes Baqaei’s message so powerful, however, is not just its political content but its emotional resonance. He speaks not as a distant official issuing a sterile statement, but as someone who understands the human cost of these machinations. When he says that false flags are an “old craft,” he is acknowledging that this is not a bug in the system but a feature of it—a tool that has been used so often that it has become routine. The video accompanying his post is a reminder that these operations are not abstract concepts; they are real events that have destroyed real lives. Families have been torn apart by bombs launched under false pretenses. Nations have been invaded and occupied based on evidence that was fabricated or exaggerated. Generations have grown up in the shadow of wars that were sold to them with lies. To humanize this content is to recognize the grief that lies beneath the geopolitical analysis. Every false flag is a betrayal of trust, not just between nations but between citizens and their own governments. It is a profound violation of the social contract, a moment when the people who are supposed to protect us instead choose to deceive us. And once that trust is broken, it is almost impossible to restore. The weary public that Baqaei describes is not merely tired of war; it is tired of being lied to, tired of being manipulated, tired of discovering that the enemies we were told to fear were often nothing more than scapegoats for the ambitions of the powerful.
There is a deeper psychological dimension to this issue that deserves consideration. Why do false flags continue to work, even in an age of information and transparency? The answer lies in the way human beings process fear. When we are afraid, we do not think critically; we react emotionally. We look for someone to blame, someone to hate, someone to punish. The false flag provides exactly that—a clear, simple narrative that makes sense of an otherwise terrifying and chaotic world. It is easier to believe that a specific enemy attacked us than to accept that violence is random, that accidents happen, that sometimes we are responsible for our own suffering. The purveyors of false flags understand this cognitive weakness and exploit it ruthlessly. They know that a lie repeated loudly enough can drown out the most careful investigation, especially if that investigation threatens to expose the comfortable narrative. In this sense, the false flag is not just a weapon of war; it is a weapon of the mind. It attacks our ability to reason, to question, to demand evidence. It turns citizens into passive consumers of official narratives, waiting to be told what to believe. Baqaei’s warning is therefore not just about the actions of the US and Israeli governments; it is about the vulnerability of every person who reads the news, watches the videos, and tries to make sense of a world that seems increasingly designed to deceive them.
In the end, what does Baqaei’s message ask of us? It asks us to be vigilant, to question the stories we are told, and to remember that the cost of war is always paid by ordinary people. It asks us to look past the flags, the slogans, and the manufactured outrage, and to see the human beings who will suffer if the false flags succeed. The spokesman’s words are a plea for clarity in a world of deliberate confusion, a reminder that the oldest craft is not war itself but the deception that precedes it. As we reflect on his message, we might consider the power we have as individuals to resist these manipulations—to demand evidence, to challenge official narratives, and to refuse to be instruments of someone else’s ambition. The drowning man may grab at the raft of lies, but we do not have to join him in the water. We can choose to see the raft for what it is, to call out the lies for what they are, and to build a world where such cruel deceptions are no longer accepted as the price of power. That is the human response to an inhuman practice. And in the end, it is the only response that offers any real hope of escaping the cycle of manufactured conflict and suffering that Baqaei so starkly describes.