On Friday, June 13, 2025, Steve Bannon opened WarRoom with a sobering historical parallel—linking the recent Israeli strike on Iran’s military leadership to the infamous “Shock and Awe” campaign that launched the Iraq War in 2003. Bannon emphasized the danger of another slow spiral into a Eurasian land war, warning of the "law of unintended consequences” and reiterating the MAGA doctrine: America First, not forever war.

"Remember the evening of 19 March 2003? All the Bush folks high-fiving?” Bannon began, drawing a sharp comparison between that moment of overconfidence and today’s headlines. "They said it was over. Look at that. We got to Baghdad in under 30 days. But what came next?”

Bannon used the moment to hammer home a lesson often ignored by policymakers and media cheerleaders: wars don’t end with headlines—they metastasize. He reflected on the collapse of the Iraqi Army and the years of chaos that followed. "We were lied to in Iraq,” he said bluntly, "and it’s Boomers especially who need to remember that.”

The warning came on the heels of what Bannon described as a "decapitation strike” by Israel against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. "Last night was not just about taking out nuclear assets,” he explained. "It was deeper. It was paramilitary. It was intelligence. Mossad was all inside Persia.”

While Bannon credited Israeli resolve—"you can’t take away from the valor and courage”—he made clear that admiration must not translate into entanglement. "We don’t oppose Israel being Israel First,” he said. "We get it. But we have to be America First.”

Bannon noted that Netanyahu’s move wasn’t spur-of-the-moment but part of a long buildup. "They bought people off. They broke the air defenses. This was surgical and deadly serious.” But for the U.S., the cost of cheering from the sidelines could once again turn into marching boots on foreign soil. "We cannot be inexorably dragged into a land war in Eurasia—either in Ukraine or in Persia.”

Calling the current conflict World War III, Bannon said it’s not just abroad—it’s here, at home, in the streets of America. "This war is being fought not just with missiles and soldiers, but with chemical warfare,” he said, referring to fentanyl and the opioid crisis. "That’s the black hand of the CCP—our existential enemy.”

The link between Tehran, Beijing, and the drug cartels is, in Bannon’s view, a deliberate strategic alliance. "They’re all in bed together. And we’ve lost a million people to fentanyl,” he charged. "This is not just incompetence—this is warfare.”

To that end, Bannon cited President Trump’s latest statement on Truth Social calling for the deportation of 20 million illegal aliens. "Some are saying 20 million is too high—I say it might be too low,” Bannon added. "Go back before Biden. Go back before Obama. We’ve let this happen for decades.”

Bannon’s ultimate point: don’t get fooled again. Don’t let legacy media or political elites rush the country into another doomed war theater. "Go back and watch Fox News’s coverage of Shock and Awe,” he said. "All the high-fives. All the cheerleading. That’s what dragged us in last time.”

"The streets of Tehran, Gaza, Kyiv—that’s not our fight unless it becomes one through stupidity and lies,” Bannon concluded. "We support allies, yes. But we are not the world’s janitors anymore. Never again.”

For more context, watch: