-- Nasir Khan, June 26, 2019
In his article, American investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter has outlined the precarious America policy towards Iran under the Trump administration, in which two main warmongers, Bolton and Pompeo, play a vital role in the ongoing conflict with Iran.
In fact, the present military threats of war and the annihilation of Iran by the only domineering superpower in the world, the United States of America, are extremely dangerous after the US had unilaterally withdrawn from a nuclear deal with Iran. The nuclear deal was a result of many years' work, supervised by an eight-member committee, consisting of the representatives of Iran, the United States of America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union.
Le me remind our readers and peace activists that an internationally binding agreement which the previous US administration of Obama had entered into cannot be flouted in this manner merely because America had a new administration under Mr. Trump! This uncalled for shift in the US policy was also a dangerous precedent in international law to disregard the legally binding agreements between states. The American action was and is a heavy blow to the rule of law in the world.
Of course, the Israeli PM Netanyahu's unrelenting efforts to embroil the US in a war with Iran is a major factor; a criminal war of aggression against Iran will serve the interests of the Zionist power in the Middle East and far beyond.
It is obvious to many of us that Netanyahu has strong pro-war supporters in Bolton and Pompeo. But we should not forget that the Zionist machinations to crush Iran are also a threat to the world peace and to millions of innocent Iranians. The pro-war Pompeo-Bolton team and its Zionist mentors should be exposed and resisted. Political differences, real or contrived, should be solved by political negotiations in a peaceful and conciliatory way, not by war and violence.
---------
No war with Iran, for now — but Mike Pompeo and John Bolton still really, really want one
Trump's "war hawks" have been cooking up war with Iran for at least a year. But much of their evidence is nonsense
Gareth Porter
June 24, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
After a week of high drama in which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated the
Trump administration was preparing for war with Iran, President Trump
sought to end the war crisis, at least for now, by declining to
retaliate against Iran over what he called “very minor” attacks.
Trump canceled a retaliatory strike on
Iran in the early hours on Friday, at least in part because he was not
certain that the drone or a Navy spy plane following it had not strayed
into Iran’s airspace in Strait of Hormuz, according to the New York
Times.
But the evident determination of Pompeo
and National Security Adviser John Bolton to get Trump to carry out a
military strike against Iran — combined with Trump’s “maximum pressure”
strategy, which has already prompted Iranian pushback — mean that such
crises are bound to continue until either war comes or U.S. policy
fundamentally changes.
Pompeo and Bolton are said by Washington
insiders to have personal differences, but they combined to create a
virtual crisis machine, as the crisis over the June 13 mine attacks on
two freighters in the Sea of Oman shows. Within a few hours after the
attacks, Pompeo declared that Iran was responsible,
referring to “the assessment of the U.S. government” — a term of art
that has come to mean the judgment of senior administration officials,
ever since the White House issued its cherry-picked intelligence summary
on the August 2013 Syria chemical weapons attack.
Pompeo presented no specific evidence,
instead reciting a litany of alleged Iranian attacks in May that
included limpet mine attacks on four ships, a rocket that fell in the
Green Zone in Baghdad and even a car bomb in Afghanistan. The latter
turned out to be a reference to a Taliban suicide bomb attack on. May
29, which Pompeo insisted on "Face the Nation” that
Iran had somehow “instigated.” He claimed to have “intelligence" to
support that far-fetched idea, but refused to reveal anything about it.
The main exhibit that was produced to
support the case Iran was responsible for the new tanker attacks
revolved around a blurry surveillance video that appears to show
Iranians in a boat next to the Japanese freighter Kokuka Courageous
removing something from the ship’s hull. Other information appears to confirm that the object was an unexploded limpet mine. But
the video evidence left key questions unanswered, and the German and
Japanese foreign ministers both declared that it was not sufficient
proof of Iranian responsibility.
Pompeo nevertheless implied during the next week that the administration was preparing for war with Iran over the issue. In a closed meeting with members of the House Intelligence Committee, he argued
that the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or
AUMF, could be used to carry out a strike against Iran. Last Sunday,
Pompeo said on “Face the Nation” that he and other national security
officials had "briefed the president a couple of times” and that the
administration was “considering a full range of options” to respond to
the attacks, including the use of military force.
Someone familiar with the briefings told an unidentified diplomat at the United Nations
— who was evidently in touch with the Bolton-Pompeo team and had ties
to conservative media in Israel — that one of the briefings had included a discussion of a strike against targets related to Iran's nuclear program.
But in an interview with TIME magazine published the next day, on Trump renounced the option of a military attack on Iran in response to the mine attacks on shipping. Asked
whether he was considering military action against Iran, Trump
responded, “I wouldn’t say that. I can’t say that at all.” He minimized
the threat represented by limpet bomb attacks as “very minor” and
contradicted Pompeo’s argument that an attack on ships in the vicinity
of the Strait of Hormuz was a dire threat to U.S. interests.
Even after the publication of that Trump interview, however, Pompeo did not back down. He characterized
the Iranian threat to shipping in the Persian Gulf region as an
existential issue for the United States and the rest of the world, in remarks to the press
at Central Command headquarters in Tampa that afternoon. By then it was
clear that the administration would continue to speak with different
voices on Iran.
Pompeo and Bolton build a war crisis strategy
Ever since taking over their preset
positions, Pompeo and Bolton have been developing a strategy to draw the
Trump administration into a war by claiming that Iran is bent on
attacking the U.S. and its allies. A key influence on this strategy has
been a still secret U.S.-Israeli agreement in December 2017 to develop a
common approach to Iran, as revealed by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid.
The Bolton-Pompeo strategy began to
unfold last September when they both claimed that rockets that had been
fired in the vicinity of U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq were aimed
at threatening U.S. diplomats. Bolton sought and obtained military
options for retaliation against Iran if any Americans were harmed by any
action of an Iranian “proxy,” and Pompeo issued a public threat to Iran
to avoid any attack on U.S. “interests.”
In fact, the claimed threat was
demonstrably false. The rockets in question were not launched by Iranian
“proxy” militias as Pompeo suggested. They were fired during violent protests in Basra by anti-Iran protesters who burned down the
Iranian consulate as well as the offices of pro-Iranian political
parties and militias. And the rocket that fell in the Green Zone of
Baghdad that same night was undoubtedly launched by sympathizers with
the Basra protesters in Baghdad who were protesting against corruption.
After the United States designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organization” and removed all sanctions waivers
for nations purchasing oil from Iran, the Iranians undoubtedly
responded by moving to a higher state of military readiness. That in
turn presented Bolton and Pompeo with new opportunities for generating a
war crisis.
Bolton kicked off the next step with a
statement on May 5, referring darkly to “troubling and escalatory
indications and warnings” and threatening that “any attack on United
States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting
force.” He announced the dispatch of a carrier strike group and a bomber
task force to the Middle East.
Those moves toward higher tensions with
Iran have been based all along on nothing more than a highly convenient
interpretation of Iranian moves — much of that interpretation was
influenced by the Israelis. The day after Bolton’s declaration, Israeli journalist Ravid reported that
a “senior Israeli official” had told him Israel had passed information
to Bolton and other senior U.S. officials at a White House meeting on
April 15, concerning a U.S. or allied target in the Gulf and "mentioning
either Saudi Arabia or the UAE.”
On a sudden trip to Iraq on May 8, Pompeo told officials there
about intelligence that Iran-backed Shiite militias were “positioning
rockets hear bases housing U.S. forces,” according to a Reuters
story. He ordered the withdrawal of nonessential personnel from the U.S.
Embassy by helicopter, ostensibly because of concerns about a possible
threat of attack.
Information on that alleged threat came from the Israelis. Senior U.S. officials in Amman, Jordan, told former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi that Israeli intelligence had given the United States photos showing a stockpile of Iranian missiles in Iraq. And an article published by the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy
(WINEP), co-authored by a former senior IDF official, pushed the idea
that “concern” was “mounting in Iraqi, U.S. and Israeli intelligence
circles” that Iran was “covertly supplying long-range artillery rockets
to proxy militias inside Iraq.”
Those Iranian rockets in Iraq were neither covert nor new. Western
intelligence had reported that Iran had distributed some two dozen such
rockets to Iraqi militias beginning in late spring or early summer of
2018. Iranian officials not only acknowledged their deployment to Reuters in August 2018 but explained that they were aimed at strengthening Iran’s deterrent to an attack.
Another key story line peddled by Bolton
and Pompeo was about Iranians posing a new offensive threat to U.S.
ships by putting missiles on relatively small boats called dhows, which
was said to be a key justification for the escalation of U.S. military
presence in the region. This narrative exploited the fact that U.S. had
photographs of the missiles being loaded onto such boats, but it made no
sense, as a specialist on missile proliferation pointed out,
because Iran had land-based anti-ship missiles that were far more
secure, and there was no known way of launching from the boats.
From May 5 to June 5, the atmosphere of
U.S.-Iran tension continued to grow, but Trump became wary of his
advisers' tone of his advisers and made it clear he wanted an end to
signs of escalating conflict. crisis. On June 5, according to a former
U.S. official, the Pentagon shut down the “crisis center” it had set up
on May 5. It was Trump's first significant pushback against his warhawk advisers, but evidently not his last.
Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian, who was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.”MORE FROM Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter
June 24, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
After a week of high drama in which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated the
Trump administration was preparing for war with Iran, President Trump
sought to end the war crisis, at least for now, by declining to
retaliate against Iran over what he called “very minor” attacks.
Trump canceled a retaliatory strike on
Iran in the early hours on Friday, at least in part because he was not
certain that the drone or a Navy spy plane following it had not strayed
into Iran’s airspace in Strait of Hormuz, according to the New York
Times.
But the evident determination of Pompeo
and National Security Adviser John Bolton to get Trump to carry out a
military strike against Iran — combined with Trump’s “maximum pressure”
strategy, which has already prompted Iranian pushback — mean that such
crises are bound to continue until either war comes or U.S. policy
fundamentally changes.
Pompeo and Bolton are said by Washington
insiders to have personal differences, but they combined to create a
virtual crisis machine, as the crisis over the June 13 mine attacks on
two freighters in the Sea of Oman shows. Within a few hours after the
attacks, Pompeo declared that Iran was responsible,
referring to “the assessment of the U.S. government” — a term of art
that has come to mean the judgment of senior administration officials,
ever since the White House issued its cherry-picked intelligence summary
on the August 2013 Syria chemical weapons attack.
Pompeo presented no specific evidence,
instead reciting a litany of alleged Iranian attacks in May that
included limpet mine attacks on four ships, a rocket that fell in the
Green Zone in Baghdad and even a car bomb in Afghanistan. The latter
turned out to be a reference to a Taliban suicide bomb attack on. May
29, which Pompeo insisted on "Face the Nation” that
Iran had somehow “instigated.” He claimed to have “intelligence" to
support that far-fetched idea, but refused to reveal anything about it.
The main exhibit that was produced to
support the case Iran was responsible for the new tanker attacks
revolved around a blurry surveillance video that appears to show
Iranians in a boat next to the Japanese freighter Kokuka Courageous
removing something from the ship’s hull. Other information appears to confirm that the object was an unexploded limpet mine. But
the video evidence left key questions unanswered, and the German and
Japanese foreign ministers both declared that it was not sufficient
proof of Iranian responsibility.
Pompeo nevertheless implied during the next week that the administration was preparing for war with Iran over the issue. In a closed meeting with members of the House Intelligence Committee, he argued
that the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or
AUMF, could be used to carry out a strike against Iran. Last Sunday,
Pompeo said on “Face the Nation” that he and other national security
officials had "briefed the president a couple of times” and that the
administration was “considering a full range of options” to respond to
the attacks, including the use of military force.
Someone familiar with the briefings told an unidentified diplomat at the United Nations
— who was evidently in touch with the Bolton-Pompeo team and had ties
to conservative media in Israel — that one of the briefings had included a discussion of a strike against targets related to Iran's nuclear program.
But in an interview with TIME magazine published the next day, on Trump renounced the option of a military attack on Iran in response to the mine attacks on shipping. Asked
whether he was considering military action against Iran, Trump
responded, “I wouldn’t say that. I can’t say that at all.” He minimized
the threat represented by limpet bomb attacks as “very minor” and
contradicted Pompeo’s argument that an attack on ships in the vicinity
of the Strait of Hormuz was a dire threat to U.S. interests.
Even after the publication of that Trump interview, however, Pompeo did not back down. He characterized
the Iranian threat to shipping in the Persian Gulf region as an
existential issue for the United States and the rest of the world, in remarks to the press
at Central Command headquarters in Tampa that afternoon. By then it was
clear that the administration would continue to speak with different
voices on Iran.
Pompeo and Bolton build a war crisis strategy
Ever since taking over their preset
positions, Pompeo and Bolton have been developing a strategy to draw the
Trump administration into a war by claiming that Iran is bent on
attacking the U.S. and its allies. A key influence on this strategy has
been a still secret U.S.-Israeli agreement in December 2017 to develop a
common approach to Iran, as revealed by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid.
The Bolton-Pompeo strategy began to
unfold last September when they both claimed that rockets that had been
fired in the vicinity of U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq were aimed
at threatening U.S. diplomats. Bolton sought and obtained military
options for retaliation against Iran if any Americans were harmed by any
action of an Iranian “proxy,” and Pompeo issued a public threat to Iran
to avoid any attack on U.S. “interests.”
In fact, the claimed threat was
demonstrably false. The rockets in question were not launched by Iranian
“proxy” militias as Pompeo suggested. They were fired during violent protests in Basra by anti-Iran protesters who burned down the
Iranian consulate as well as the offices of pro-Iranian political
parties and militias. And the rocket that fell in the Green Zone of
Baghdad that same night was undoubtedly launched by sympathizers with
the Basra protesters in Baghdad who were protesting against corruption.
After the United States designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organization” and removed all sanctions waivers
for nations purchasing oil from Iran, the Iranians undoubtedly
responded by moving to a higher state of military readiness. That in
turn presented Bolton and Pompeo with new opportunities for generating a
war crisis.
Bolton kicked off the next step with a
statement on May 5, referring darkly to “troubling and escalatory
indications and warnings” and threatening that “any attack on United
States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting
force.” He announced the dispatch of a carrier strike group and a bomber
task force to the Middle East.
Those moves toward higher tensions with
Iran have been based all along on nothing more than a highly convenient
interpretation of Iranian moves — much of that interpretation was
influenced by the Israelis. The day after Bolton’s declaration, Israeli journalist Ravid reported that
a “senior Israeli official” had told him Israel had passed information
to Bolton and other senior U.S. officials at a White House meeting on
April 15, concerning a U.S. or allied target in the Gulf and "mentioning
either Saudi Arabia or the UAE.”
On a sudden trip to Iraq on May 8, Pompeo told officials there
about intelligence that Iran-backed Shiite militias were “positioning
rockets hear bases housing U.S. forces,” according to a Reuters
story. He ordered the withdrawal of nonessential personnel from the U.S.
Embassy by helicopter, ostensibly because of concerns about a possible
threat of attack.
Information on that alleged threat came from the Israelis. Senior U.S. officials in Amman, Jordan, told former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi that Israeli intelligence had given the United States photos showing a stockpile of Iranian missiles in Iraq. And an article published by the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy
(WINEP), co-authored by a former senior IDF official, pushed the idea
that “concern” was “mounting in Iraqi, U.S. and Israeli intelligence
circles” that Iran was “covertly supplying long-range artillery rockets
to proxy militias inside Iraq.”
Those Iranian rockets in Iraq were neither covert nor new. Western
intelligence had reported that Iran had distributed some two dozen such
rockets to Iraqi militias beginning in late spring or early summer of
2018. Iranian officials not only acknowledged their deployment to Reuters in August 2018 but explained that they were aimed at strengthening Iran’s deterrent to an attack.
Another key story line peddled by Bolton
and Pompeo was about Iranians posing a new offensive threat to U.S.
ships by putting missiles on relatively small boats called dhows, which
was said to be a key justification for the escalation of U.S. military
presence in the region. This narrative exploited the fact that U.S. had
photographs of the missiles being loaded onto such boats, but it made no
sense, as a specialist on missile proliferation pointed out,
because Iran had land-based anti-ship missiles that were far more
secure, and there was no known way of launching from the boats.
From May 5 to June 5, the atmosphere of
U.S.-Iran tension continued to grow, but Trump became wary of his
advisers' tone of his advisers and made it clear he wanted an end to
signs of escalating conflict. crisis. On June 5, according to a former
U.S. official, the Pentagon shut down the “crisis center” it had set up
on May 5. It was Trump's first significant pushback against his warhawk advisers, but evidently not his last.
Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian, who was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.”MORE FROM Gareth Porter
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