Michigan’s Senate race has been consumed by Abdul El-Sayed’s Hasan Piker ties while Republican Mike Rogers’s career-long war advocacy goes unexamined. Branko Marcetic assembles the two-decade record — and it is far more relevant to Michiganders’ struggles than old tweets.
The pattern, from the House Intelligence Committee chair’s perch:
- 2006 staff report claiming Iran “is seeking nuclear weapons” — the IAEA called it “outrageous and dishonest,” and Rogers admitted one caption claim was false; the AP compared the clash to the WMD fight before Iraq
- The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate judged with “high confidence” that Tehran had halted its weapons program — Rogers kept repeating the claim dozens of times for the next two decades
- 2012: chided Obama for resisting Netanyahu’s war-pressure campaign and preemptively pledged the US would fight a war Israel started — no such defense treaty exists
- Made common cause with the MEK, a US-designated terrorist group lobbying for regime change, cosponsoring its delisting
- Fought the JCPOA with a “zero enrichment” poison pill; Trump’s 2018 withdrawal sent Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpiles spiking back up
Now the war is in its sixth month. Rogers calls it “a win-win-win,” tells voters “we got plenty of oil,” and stays wary of the diplomatic off-ramp while Michigan eats the costs: over $2 billion in economic impact, $15–20 a week more on gas in West Michigan, up to $22,000 more per season for farmers.
The closing point lands hard: it took twenty years, but Rogers’s patient work against diplomacy finally came to fruition — the country is caught in the very trap he spent his career building.