.@SenMarcoRubio may have just handed Tehran one of the biggest propaganda gifts of this war and planted a deeply damaging narrative in the minds of Iranians who once viewed America favorably, potentially shaping their perception of the U.S. for generations to come. Reaching back 2,500 years to invoke Xerxes and the burning of Athens to frame a contemporary war isn’t just lazy history. It’s dangerous politics. Ancient empires fought, destroyed, and conquered one another. Including Alexander's burning of Persepolis. Dragging that into today’s conflict explains nothing. It just reframes this war as a civilizational clash. And that plays directly into Tehran’s hands. For years, the Iranian government has struggled to convince its own people that the U.S. is not against the regime, but against Iran itself. @marcorubio framing makes that argument for them. Even many Iranians who despise the Islamic Republic are deeply proud of Iran’s history and identity. Foreign attacks and civilizational rhetoric don’t win them over. They push people away. So instead of isolating the government, this kind of rhetoric helps it rally around nationalist sentiment and resistance. Whatever the intent, the effect is clear. Washington is helping Tehran sell a story that it could never fully sell on its own: That the United States is at war with Iran itself. At a time when Washington has yet to provide a full public accounting of the strike on a school in Minab that tragically killed more than 168 people on the first day of the war, including 120 children, when 1000s of Iranians have been killed, dozens of Americans have lost their lives, hundreds more have been wounded, and ordinary Americans are paying the economic price of this war, Rubio's attempt to reach back 2,500 years to invoke a clash of civilizations is a stunningly misguided diversion. Rather than answering the most urgent questions why the United States went to war, what it has achieved, and how it justifies the enormous human suffering and destruction it has inflicted- he seems to be searching ancient history for a moral framework to explain a war whose present-day consequences demand accountability. The question is not what Xerxes did to Athens 2,500 years ago. It is what the United States is doing to Iran today, why it is doing it, and who will be held accountable for the lives destroyed in the process.