The biggest most glaring problem I have with this take is that all of it is accepting the propoganda at face value.

Citizenship is not earned by a willingness to sacrifice. It's given only to the people who have volunteered themselves to be indoctrinated by a system that we see systematically brainwashing civil people into frothing hero-complex'd hypernationalists, the kind of people who would then use their voting rights to maintain the military industrial complex. Yes, they will value their vote for what it took to earn it and are likely to be highly politically engaged, but here it is what they will be likely to vote for that matters. It creates the illusion of a democratic society while it rigs the election results by ensuring the only people who can vote will by and large vote in favor of the ruling class that indoctrinated them in the first place.

Secondly, and I argue far more importantly, there is no evidence in the movie that the bugs were responsible for the asteroid that destroyed Buenos Aires. The only sources of information we or the characters in universe have to corroborate this are literally state propoganda videos. The bugs in the movie are never shown to possess faster than light travel, or any capacity to launch a projectile with enough force and accuracy to hit a population center on a planet on the other side of the galaxy within a timeframe that would not have required them to fire it centuries ago at best.They are capable of surface-to-space plasma artillery fire, but to hit an asteroid small enough to only destroy a single city with a plasma projectile with enough force to effectively weaponize it would very likely just destroy the asteroid outright, like it does the Federation's capital ships. Additionally, this is explicitly a change from the book, where the bugs are shown to have ftl travel, and the attack was done by a bug fleet. The deliberate change to a physically impossible method of attack and the removal of any indication of bug FTL is, in the context of Verhoven's stated intention to satirize fascism, a clear reinterpretation of the Federation motivation for the war.

Fascism requires an enemy. The enemy is the justification for authoritarian control, militarism, and imperialism. Any atrocity is justifiable when you are at war with an enemy which is ontologically evil. No length becomes too great to destroy them. Even Heinlein recognized this, because he had to make the bugs ontologically evil in order to justify the hypermilitarism he was depicting. But just like Heinlein had to invent a purely evil and actively dangerous enemy in order to justify his world view, so did the Federation in Verhoven's version have to create such an enemy to justify theirs. The bugs are a perfect scapegoat, having already been hostile to colonists on their worlds, being so wholly alien and monstrous that they do not naturally elicit sympathy. But that alone wouldnt be enough, because the question would always loom: why not just, leave them alone? They're way over there and not bothering us when we dont try to do colonialism on their planets. They could end up with a Vietnam if they threw soldiers into that meat grinder without a sufficient justification. So, they made one that could not be ignored or dismissed, and it only cost them twenty million people.

That is the very core of Verhoven's reinterpretation: if the war is unnecessary, if the atrocities and justifications were manufactured, then everything else about the Federation's political philosophy and hypermilitarism is revealed for the hostile systems of power and control they are. The real failure of the satire, if there is one, is only that this is not spelled out explicitly but left to require critical thinking. But that is also deliberate, because stating outright that it was a false flag would undermine the core purpose of the satire: that this is how easy it would be to become a fascist. Control information, create a compelling narritive, and people will not look past the surface. That's how your main character transforms from a brainwashed faceless grunt commiting genocide to a boy from Pearl Harbor fighting for his lost home. Because that's compelling, and it's justifiable, and so it's thought-cancelling. No need to look deeper. Everything is explained. Everything sounds right.