The Peace President is arranging forces and making public statements threatening Iran with war again:
It is unlikely that the world's ailing hegemon would move the largest aircraft carrier on the face of the earth out of the Caribbean, where it had been previously stationed, to the Middle East, if it did not intend to use it. Each day, the U.S. has redeployed substantial quantities of military tonnage to its bases surrounding the Persian Gulf. What has already functioned as an outlandishly expensive negotiating tactic is now in place as the infrastructure for not only a single round of strikes, but a prolonged campaign.
CBS News reported on Wednesday that national security officials informed U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday that American forces will be ready to attack as early as Saturday. There is very little standing in the way of what threatens to be a catastrophic war. (1)
The Iranians have the option of closing the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s key trading routes. They also have a substantial missile force with which they can strike Israel, and Israel’s defensive interceptor missile supply is reportedly seriously depleted.
Scott Lucas describes why military attacks on Iran doesn’t support the protesters or bring more support to the dissidents. For the reason that has been seen again and again, when a country is attacked the government can count on a nationalist-patriotic reaction. As we saw on a large scale during the Second World War in Britain and Germany, and as we saw in the Vietnam War, massive aerial bombardment even over a long term don’t create any immediate mass immediate demand to overthrow the regime. In practice, when cities are bombed, people have to rely immediately and heavily on their neighbors and their government to deal with the death and destruction caused by the bombing. Even people who hate the regime.
Lucas asks, “So where’s the President of Peace now?” (2)
As Joshua Leifer puts it:
Currently, there are almost no forces, domestic or international, that might act as a brake on Trump's war ambitions. In the U.S., media coverage of the build-up to a potentially calamitous war has been anemic. To the extent that it exists at all, it is almost entirely devoid of discussion of the international legal ramifications and geopolitical consequences of the president's unilateral decision to attack another country that is home to roughly 90 million people. [my emphasis]
But he continues immediately to say, “The American public has been demoralized into submission by unceasing chaos at home, leaving Trump with less reason to worry about foreign policy backlash than his recent predecessors.”
Seriously? The mass protests and the calamitous fall in Trump’s popularity and the very unusual Republican setbacks in elections in the last few months say to Leifer that the American people are “demoralized”? Does being angry and disgusted really translate to “demoralized”?
I wouldn’t put it that way …
Also, it’s not as though every other country in the world thinks it’s a-okay for the US to illegally bomb Iran in pursuit of regime change. We see this is a dispute between the US and Britain over the island of Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia is a British territory in the Indian Ocean that the US has been able to use for military operations. “Numerous air operations were launched from Diego Garcia during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), U.S.-led strikes on Afghanistan (2001), and the initial phase (2003) of the Iraq War.”
Trump is withdrawing his support for a deal involving Great Britain over the Chagos Island, also in the Indian Ocean, for which Britain wants to hand over control to Mauritius. Britain Prime Minister Keir Starmer is stating that Britain will not allow US forces to use bases on Diego Garcia for an attack on Iran, which appears to be impending.
This is one more effect of the Trump regime’s hostility to its NATO allies and the subsequent European recognition that they can no longer count on the US to support its mutual-defense commitment under the NATO Treaty – although the European governments are phrasing it more diplomatically!
Peace President Trump is building up to another military attack on Iran.
It also gives us yet another reminder that Trump’s disjointed statements are exactly what is not needed if the US wants other countries including adversaries to understand the diplomatic signals they are trying to send.
I see that our Opus Dei Vice President JD Vance is picking up Trump’s quirky grammar in which adjectives are used as nouns. This is example is from Thursday's Haaretz in which he uses “military” as a noun. Which is not quite as bad as Trump’s habit, because “military” is also a noun, as in “the American military” or “send in the military.”
But what kind of signal is it to say that “military is the only option”? Military what? Military espionage? Military intervention? Military invasion?
The Peace President himself said this a few days ago about Iran:
That country is a mess right now because of us. We went in, we wiped out their nuclear. Peace in the Middle East. If I didn't take out their nuclear, think of it. If we didn't take out that nuclear, we wouldn't have peace in the Middle East, because the Arab countries could have never done that. They were very, very afraid of Iran. [my emphasis] (1)
Does this mean the US destroyed nuclear facilities of some kind? That the CIA assassinated all Iran nuclear scientists? That a couple of Iranian missiles that could carry nuclear warheads were destroyed? In any case, any claim that US military strikes have obliterated all traces of Iranian nuclear weapons development would be very hard to believe.
Notably, Trump is also saying that Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should be “very worried.” Is he threatening to assassinate or kidnap Khamenei personally? How does such a threat make any diplomatic sense just as a new round of intense diplomacy is beginning?
As Laura Rozen recently reported:
“Trump lost Georgia in 2020,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, posted on Twitter. “But today he continued his sore loser’s crusade, with an FBI raid (!) on a Georgia election office.
“From Minnesota to Georgia, we’re watching the President unravel, weaponizing federal law enforcement for personal power and revenge,” Ossoff continued. “We must stop him.” [my emphasis] (2)
Laura Rozen notes that Joe Biden’s scheduled speech to the UN General Assembly on September 24 will be his last to that forum:
“This is obviously Biden’s farewell appearance at the General Assembly,” Richard Gowan, UN Director at the International Crisis Group, said in a call with journalists on Monday previewing next week’s events.
“I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. President will get a mixed reception here,” he said. “I think that other UN members do recognize that Biden and his team did restore a lot of US-UN cooperation in 2021 and 2022…But I think there’s also been an underlying sense of Biden himself and his immediate foreign policy circle as being not that interested in the UN. And obviously, the U.S positioning over the ceasefire in Gaza in late 2023 and early 2024 burnt a huge amount of goodwill.” [my emphasis] (1)
Last year, Biden Addressed the General Assembly on September 19, around three weeks before the October 7 attack in Israel. That speech was generally boilerplate about the need for world cooperation and the ability of countries to overcome even deep differences. But this short passage sounds a bit like a message in a bottle from a long-ago time:
Similarly, the groundbreaking effort we announced at the G20 connect India — to connect India to Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel will spur opportunities and investment across two continents.
This is part of our effort to build a more sustainable, integrated Middle East. It demonstrates how Israel’s greater normalization and economic connection with its neighbors is delivering positive and practical impacts even as we continue to work tirelessly to support a just and lasting peace between Isr- — the Israelis and Palestinians — two states for two people. (2)
It's worth noting that this approach to Middle East stability and peace was in many ways a continuation of the Trump policy reflected in the Abraham Accords deal. And, unfortunately, Biden seems to have largely continued the Trump diplomatic approach of building a partnership between Arab nations and Israel that would allow Netanyahu’s policy of totally neglecting real efforts for an Israel-Palestine peace agreement while building stable relationships with Arab autocracies.
That hasn’t worked out so well, as we see in the daily news as Israel’s longest war continues with no obvious end in sight.
Biden had campaigned on renewing the Iran nuclear non-proliferation agreement from which Trump had withdrawn. But he never did. Although Rozen notes:
On Iran, while the Biden administration its initial two years in office intensively engaged in negotiations to try to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that Trump quit in 2018, the effort petered out, after Iranian leaders did not accepted a painstakingly negotiated updated draft deal in August 2022. Then Iran was riven by months of the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests following the death in September 2022 of a young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police over how she was wearing her headscarf.
The massive attack by Iran-backed Hamas on Israel last October 7 that killed over 1,200 Israelis and subsequently escalated tensions between Israel and Iran and Iran-backed proxies over the past months has further made visible U.S. diplomacy with Iran a domestic political pariah, particularly in a US election year.
She also notes that the new Pezeshkian Masoud Pezeshkian will be making his UN debut as he balances the desire for a new nuclear nonproliferation agreement, Iran’s sales of short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, and Netanyahu’s spreading war in the Middle East. One must wonder if Iranian leaders, facing a serious war with nuclear-armed Israel and (if Netanyahu gets his wish) with the US, aren’t reflecting on the experience of Ukraine, which briefly held nuclear weapons in the beginning of its post-Soviet independence but gave them up.
And hanging over the scene is the possibility of Donald Trump soon becoming President again.
In the live presentation of the 2023 General Assembly speech itself, Biden had a a number of somewhat slurred words. (3) But it was generally well-delivered and showed no obvious signs of mental impairment. Although presumably he was reading from a teleprompter, which he will presumably (hopefully) be doing this week.
More than 130 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs are slated to speak along with dozens of ministers, and the issues from the summit are expected to dominate their speeches and private meetings, especially the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan and the growing possibility of a wider Mideast war.
“There is going to be a rather obvious gap between the Summit of the Future, with its focus on expanding international cooperation, and the reality that the U.N. is failing in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group. “Those three wars will be top topics of attention for most of the week.” [my emphasis]
And, yes, there is a serious war going on in Sudan, as described by this recent PBS Newshour documentary: (5)
Business Insider reports on the revelation by the New York Times that Israel apparently just did major sabotage on Iran’s energy infrastructure.
Iran and Israel are not officially at war with Israel, though Israel claims that Iran-aligned groups like Lebanese Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen are Iranian proxies. Iran is allied with both those groups.
"This shows that the covert networks operating in Iran have expanded their target list and advanced beyond just military and nuclear sites," Shahin Modarres, a security analyst focused on the Middle East, told the Times. "It's a major challenge and reputation blow for Iran's intelligence and security agencies."
While Israel has targeted military and nuclear sites in Iran before, this attack hit the Islamic Republic's vital energy infrastructure.
"The level of impact was very high because these are two significant pipelines going south to north. We have never seen anything like this in scale and scope," said Homayoun Falakshahi, a senior energy analyst at Kpler, per The Times. (1)
It’s important to keep in mind that Bibi Netanyahu for years has been trying to get the US involved in a direct war against Iran. A goal for which neoconservative hawks have been enthusiastic.
Middle East Eye reported in December:
Over the years Israel has been linked to numerous strikes in Iran, primarily targeting the country’s nuclear program, but the country rarely publicly confirms its role in the attacks.
In January of this year [2023], Iran reported a large explosion in the city of Isfahan which was caused by a failed drone attack on a military plant in the central city, according to authorities.
Tehran did not say who launched the attack against the plant but suspicion fell on Israel, which is also accused of starting a series of fires in industrial, military, and nuclear sites across Iran.
In 2021, Tehran vowed to seek revenge against Israel after it accused Tel Aviv of sabotaging the Natanz nuclear power plant. (2) [my emphasis]
Almost a year ago, the Times of Israel carried a report headlined, ”Netanyahu said to huddle repeatedly with military brass over possible attack on Iran.” (3)
Netanyahu has been at this for a while:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities caused such “panic” in the US that the Obama administration rushed to accept an Iranian proposal to open negotiations on a nuclear deal in 2012, before economic sanctions against the regime had taken their full toll, according to the author of a new book on Israel’s espionage and security agencies.
The Israeli prime minister’s bellicose rhetoric, his preparations for an attack, and his approval of the Mossad’s continued assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, thus prompted the very deal he has so bitterly opposed, said Ronen Bergman, whose “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” is published in the US next week. [2018] (4)
But it goes back even further:
In 1992, MK [Member of the Knesset] Benjamin Netanyahu said that within three to five years Iran would have a nuclear bomb. In 1993, he published an opinion piece in the Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth in which he predicted that by 1999 Iran would have a nuclear bomb, and argued that this was the greatest threat to [Israel].
In July 1996, newly minted Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a special session of the U.S. Congress in which he warned of an Iranian bomb and said that the regime was approaching this goal with worrisome speed. In September 2002 “worried citizen” Netanyahu appeared once again before Congress. He encouraged its members to go to war against Iraq and said that there was “no doubt” that Saddam Hussein was approaching an atom bomb and his nuclear program was so advanced that he has centrifuges the size of “washing machines” (Saddam did not have a nuclear program). Netanyahu claimed that Saddam also had biological and chemical weapons (he didn’t) and warned that the moment the United States attacked, Saddam would launch these weapons against Israel and most interesting of all – he predicted that Saddam’s fall would have a particularly positive effect on the entire region, and might even lead to the fall of the regimes in Iran and Libya. (5) [my emphasis]
And he was still at it a couple of months before last year’s October 7 attack by Hamas:
Whenever things get difficult, complicated or politically untenable, you can always count on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rant and issue grave apocalyptic warnings about Iran. After all, stopping Iran's nuclear program and saving Western civilization along the way is the defining historic role of his life. This is 1938 all over again, Iran is Nazi Germany and Netanyahu sees himself as the reluctant Winston Churchill empowered by history to stand up to the threat. ...
Even judging by his own standards of endless shamelessness and audacious chutzpah,Netanyahu's criticism of the U.S.-Iranian understandings being reported in the media this weekend stands out. “Arrangements that do not dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure do not stop its nuclear program,” said a statement Saturday evening from the Prime Minister’s Office.
All this from the man whose recklessness brought Iran to the nuclear threshold. The man who opposed the original nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), went behind then-President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s backs in 2015 and sanctimoniously told Congress there was a “better deal” but, unsurprisingly, never came up with one.
This is the man who enthusiastically encouraged then-President Donald Trump to withdraw from the deal in 2018, because “it’s a bad agreement,” and because Trump, who negotiated real estate deals in Manhattan and sees himself as the ultimate dealmaker, could of course get a better nuclear deal with Iran.
This is the man who hoped Trump would launch a military strike against Iran, and the same man who egregiously failed to produce or even propose an alternative policy. This consequently led Iran to uninterruptedly enrich uranium – which brings us to where we are now. (6) [my emphasis]
It has been Netanyahu’s long-standing goal to involve the United States in a war against Iran.
Here's an example of a allegedly "bipartisan" pitch from a leading Republican foreign policy figure, Nikki Haley, Biden shouldn’t reject all of Trump’s foreign policies. Here are three he should keep.Washington Post 12/17/2020. Haley was a Republican Governor of South Carolina, Trump's Ambassador to the UN 2017-19, and a former member of the Board of Directors for giant weapons contractor Boeing.
[I]n 2013 Haley signed legislation awarding Boeing $120 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies. The crony capitalist giant has received more than $1 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies or guarantees in connection with its presence in the Palmetto State – including $400 million in up-front proceeds from government-issued bonds to build its gleaming North Charleston, S.C. facility.
The company also received another $306 million in property tax breaks in connection with its taxpayer-funded incentives tab.
In addition to supporting these handouts, Haley was also a vocal (albeit hypocritical) opponent of unionization at Boeing’s South Carolina facility – frequently using her bully pulpit to campaign against organized labor’s efforts to gain a foothold in the Palmetto State.
So, what does Nikki Boeing think that the Biden-Harris Administration should do in foreign policy? Well, a New Cold War with China sounds really cool to her. (Boeing has products to help!) She also uses the now-revived nostalgic name "Communist China."
Of course, she wants Biden to keep on trying to overthrow the governments of Cuba and Venezuela because, well, socialism. Or something. Presumably she would be happy for him to knock of other inconvenient regimes here and there in Latin America, especially in countries with strategic raw materials not yet being sufficiently profitable to American coroporations. Bitness is bitness, after all.
And a war with Iran would be awesome, too!
Gosh, Nikki Boeing has great Bipartisan ideas to help the Biden-Harris Administration succeed!
I'm sure that other Republicans have their own supportive Bipartisan suggestions, too. And not just on foreign policy or matters particularly help to Boeing Corporations, either.
Even as Trump and his allies officially refuse to concede the Nov. 3 election, the White House and federal agencies are hurrying to finish dozens of regulatory changes before Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20. The rules range from long-simmering administration priorities to last-minute scrambles and affect everything from creature comforts like showerheads and clothes washers to life-or-death issues like federal executions and international refugees. They impact everyone from the most powerful, such as oil drillers, drugmakers and tech startups, to the most vulnerable, such as families on food stamps, transgender people in homeless shelters, migrant workers and endangered species. ProPublica is tracking those regulations as they move through the rule-making process.
One change they are trying to rush through is to change Department of Agriculture regulation to allow chicken processors to speed up their production lines, which "could lead to more worker injuries and make it harder to stop germs like salmonella."
But, to be fair, the QAnon Republicans may think that salmonella outbreaks are a HOAX. You know, just like COVID-19.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani blames Israel for the recent assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was "head of the ministry of defence's research and innovation organisation" and who "was clearly still a key player" in the Iranian nuclear program. (Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Iran vows to avenge scientist's assassinationBBC News 11/28/2020)
Of course, we don't know at this point who was behind Fahrizadeh's assassination, and who knows when if ever the information will become public. Trita Parsi explains why it plausible to think that Israel was behind it. He also explains the international alignment in which Israel and Saudi Arabia perceive it in their interest to have the US go to war against Iran. It's a type of let's-you-and-him-fight kind of diplomacy on their point. Provoking military tensions and conflicts among other countries, of course, is nothing at all new in international relations.
Parsi explains:
While it’s highly unlikely that Israel would have carried out the assassination without a green light from the Trump administration, a more direct U.S. role cannot be entirely discounted. The Trump administration has reportedly run several joint sabotage operations with Israel against Iran’s nuclear facilities in the past year and relied in part on Israeli intelligence in carrying out the assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani outside the Baghdad airport last January. Earlier this month, Trump himself reportedly raised the possibility of attacking Iran with his top national-security advisers, while it was just last week that the administration’s most prominent Iran hawk, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, well as leaders of Iran’s adversaries in the Persian Gulf, notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. [my emphasis]
In any event, conducting attacks in Iran has few downsides for Israel right now. Iran could lash out and spark a broader conflict that sucks in the United States, bringing about a U.S.-Iran confrontation that Netanyahu has long sought.
Or, if Iran sits tight to wait to deal with President-elect Joe Biden, the Trump administration is highly unlikely to impose any costs on other Israeli provocations. [my emphasis]
Israel is widely agreed to be the most likely perpetrator. Mossad is reported to have been behind a string of assassinations of other Iranian nuclear scientists – reports Israeli officials have occasionally hinted were true.
According to former officials, the Obama administration leaned on Israel to discontinue those assassinations in 2013, as it started talks with Tehran that led two years later to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), by which Iran accepted constraints on its nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.
It would be a fair guess that Joe Biden would also oppose such assassinations when he takes office on 20 January and tries to reconstitute the JCPOA – which has been left wounded but just about alive in the wake of Donald Trump’s withdrawal in 2018.
He quotes Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “The objective behind the killing wasn’t to hinder the nuclear programme but to undermine diplomacy.”
It's also a reminder that whatever Trump's America First foreign policy may have been, it was not a peace policy.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson has been posting daily updates on American political developments on her Facebook account. In her entry for 11/16/2020, she described the current public posture of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this way:
This afternoon Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris and President-Elect Joe Biden held a press conference outlining their economic strategy. They had just come from a strategy meeting with business leaders and union officials, and Biden seemed quite optimistic that the different groups had found common ground. In a notable change from his predecessor, Biden was transparent about who was at the meeting, identifying the attendees by name and position.
The plans Biden and Harris outlined essentially boiled down to what they had said on the campaign trail: they will bring jobs back to America by limiting federal contracts to companies in the country, support a $15 minimum wage, and support unions. Biden also reiterated that it is imperative for Congress to pass the Heroes Act, the $3 trillion coronavirus relief act the House of Representatives passed last May but which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refuses to take up. (“Heroes” stands for Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act.)
Biden reminded listeners that the states are in a crisis through no fault of their own, and they cannot fix it on their own, either. By law, virtually no state and local governments can operate with a deficit, while the federal government can. [my emphasis]
I don't have a problem with vague invocations of "working together". It's such standard political rhetoric that it alone doesn't signal much. But there is tremendous pressure from large Democratic donors for Democratic officials to "work together" with Republicans for actions that benefit the One Percent. So the real focus for people wanted to follow what's happening is the actual policies that emerge from this projected polite cooperation.
Richardson's summary indicates that Biden and Harris are so far sticking to major elements of their agreed program, the program that is the mandate on which they were elected. And since the Democrats typically are reluctant to fight for its own positions, that's a good sign, so far as it goes.
She also calls attention to the Republicans' cynical effort to withhold aid from states in order to drive them into bankruptcy. "But the process of driving states to that point means that Americans will lose their homes or their apartments, and be unable to afford food. And that is coming to pass. Today CBS News posted a video of thousands of cars lined up in Dallas, Texas, to collect boxes of food."
She directs our attention to an article from David Frum, the Shrub Bush speechwriter credited with coming up with the phrase "axis of evil," Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go BankruptThe Atlantic 11/25/2020. He explains:
First, the country’s wealthiest and most productive states are overwhelmingly blue. Of the 15 states least reliant on federal transfers, 11 are led by Democratic governors. Of the 15 states most reliant on federal transfers, 11 have Republican governors.
Second, Congress is dominated by Republicans. Republicans controlled the House for eight of the last 10 years; the Senate for six. Because of the Republican hold on the Senate, the federal judiciary has likewise shifted in conservative and Republican directions.
A state bankruptcy process would thus enable a Republican Party based in the poorer states to use its federal ascendancy to impose its priorities upon the budgets of the richer states.
Frum's article also describes the important distinction betwee a state default and a state bankruptcy.
(BTW, even though I'm citing Frum here on something that's actually informative and helpful, I'm still going to keep referring to the following statement as The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; Gibbs on the LeftFrumForum 08/10/2010.)
Richardson explains:
The federal judiciary has shifted rightward in the last ten years, so bankruptcy would allow a federal judge to impose Republican priorities on Democratic states like New York, for example, states Republicans have little hope of controlling through elections. In such proceedings, the first things to go would be pensions and social welfare programs, while judges would protect bondholders, many of them wealthy people who pour money into the Political Action Committees of Republican politicians. [my emphasis]
It's important for us all to remember that Trumpism is not an aberration in the Republican Party. It was the Republican Party that produced Trumpism. The Republicans in Congress and the statehouses have no intention to enter some kind of strategic Bipartisanship with the Biden-Harris Administration to deal with the pandemic or the economic depression. Biden may be able to peel off some Republican votes on individual measures having to do with those two major problems. But some kind of broad strategic cooperation of the kind that the Obama-Biden Administration pursued in vain for eight years is not in the cards. The only Grand Bargain the Republican Party will accept is one that enacts radical Republican policies.
Richardson provides this reminder that whatever he may have done right in foreign policy, by accident or otherwise, he did not have a pro-peace policy: "2018. Last Thursday, Trump asked his advisers whether he could do something about Iran’s main nuclear site, but appears to have been talked out of military action as they warned a military strike could escalate into a bigger conflict."
After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table, according to administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.
Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said. A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president. ...
The episode underscored how Mr. Trump still faces an array of global threats in his final weeks in office. A strike on Iran may not play well to his base, which is largely opposed to a deeper American conflict in the Middle East, but it could poison relations with Tehran so that it would be much harder for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, as he has promised to do. ...
The events of the past few days are not the first time that Iran policy has emerged in the final days of a departing administration. During the last days of the Bush administration in 2008, Israeli officials, concerned that the incoming Obama administration would seek to block it from striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, sought bunker-busting bombs, bombers and intelligence assistance from the United States for an Israeli-led strike.
Vice President Dick Cheney later wrote in his memoir that he supported the idea. President George W. Bush did not, but the result was a far closer collaboration with Israel on a cyberstrike against the Natanz facility, which took out about 1,000 of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. [my emphasis]
In other words, a late-administration attack on Iran would be a continuation of a Republican precedent set by the Cheney-Bush Administration, not some uniquely Trumpian idea.
Richardson also comments on a reported argument within the Administration about drawdowns of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Pentagon opposes. Even Sen. Majority Mitch McConnell has publicly objected to the idea. The Times also reports on that controversy (Eric Schmitt et al, Trump Is Said to Be Preparing to Withdraw Troops From Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia 11/16/2020):
Under a draft order circulating at the Pentagon on Monday, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be halved from the current deployment of 4,500 troops, officials said.
In Iraq, the Pentagon would trim force levels slightly below the 3,000 troops that commanders had previously announced. And in Somalia, virtually all of the more than 700 troops conducting training and counterterrorism missions would leave. ...
But the president’s aspirations have long run into resistance, as his own national security officials argued that abandonment of such troubled countries could have catastrophic consequences — such as when the United States pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, leaving a vacuum that fostered the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Mr. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to withdraw from Syria, but several hundred U.S. troops remain stationed there, partly to protect coveted oil fields held by American-backed Syrian Kurdish allies from being seized by the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The current deliberations over withdrawals would not affect those in Syria, officials said.
The plan under discussion to pull out of Somalia is said to not apply to U.S. forces stationed in nearby Kenya and Djibouti, where American drones that carry out airstrikes in Somalia are based, according to officials familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. [my emphasis]
What's that you say? You didn't know the US military was stationed in Somalia and Kenya and Djibouti? You didn't know there was a country named Djibouti? You're not alone. The US reporting on US military activities abroad is pretty lacking. It's not nearly as interesting for TV pundits as, say, Hillary Clinton's emails.
When it comes to military interventions, war critics need to be able to walk and talk at the same time. One of the jaded pieces of conventional wisdom about war is that it's a hell of a lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one. And there are lots of vested interests, aka, the military-industrial complex, that want it to be hard to get out of a war. Or to withdraw US troops completely from a country where they have been at war.
But that said, blundering around is just not a good way to run foreign policy. US troops should have been out of Afghanistan and Syria and Somalia years ago. But the process of removing them does matter. Would it be reckless or irresponsible to cut the number of troops in Afghanistan by half right away? I seriously doubt it. But it's also a call that needs to be informed by accurate, on-the-ground information, and not all that can be made immediately public.
But open-ended commitments of troops can also be a bad idea. A really bad idea. And, at some point, if the US is going to remove troops from a country, they actually have to do it by some actual point in time. The pullout of troops from the Kurdish enclave in Syria was particularly problematic because it was not only sudden. It also directly empowered Turkey to undertake an ethnic cleansing operation immediately following the pullout.
But anyone wanting to defend Trump as a pro-peace President should take note in those stories that: (1) a serious discussion of a immediate military attack on Iran is under way; (2) the Afghanistan pullout plan reported does not envision a full withdrawal of all remaining troops (it's easier to augment an existing commitment of troops than to begin a new commitment after all troops are gone); and, (3) when Trump abandoned Kurdish allies to Turkish ethnic cleansing, he made sure to leave troops to guard oil wells in Kurdish territory. Trump has said publicly that he thought the US should just seize natural resources from countries we invade, a blatant violation of international law.
Trump is not a peace advocate and has definitely not been a peace President.
Recent provocations included escalating attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq by Iranian-backed militias. Grown out of militias that fought against coalition forces during the Iraq War, they were reconstituted and rebranded with Iranian help to fight against ISIS. Modeled to some degree on Lebanese Hezbollah, they constitute a state within a state, and are part of the reason for months of protests in Baghdad against government corruption and Iranian influence in the country. These attacks culminated in a rocket attack near Kirkuk on December 27, in which a U.S. contractor was killed and several U.S. and Iraqi military personnel were wounded. The U.S. retaliated on December 29, striking five Kataeb Hezbollah bases in Iraq, killing at least 25. The militia responded by violently protesting at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, causing extensive damage, including graffiti reading “Soleimani is my commander.” The U.S. answered by sending Marines to the embassy, deploying portions of the 82nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force to the region, and targeting Soleimani.
Since the killing of Soleimani, Iranian state television called the act the “the biggest miscalculation by the U.S.” in the post-World War II period, a telling statement when one considers that same period includes the U.S.-backed coup of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, U.S. support for the Shah of Iran through 1979, and the accidental downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by USS Vincennes in 1985, all cardinal sins in the eyes of the Iranian regime. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned of “harsh retaliation,” and the U.S. Embassy urged Americans to leave Iraq immediately. The Iraqi parliament voted along sectarian lines on a non-binding resolution to expel U.S. forces, and President Trump responded with a threat of sanctions. On January 5, Iran announced that it would no longer abide by the restrictions of the nuclear agreement, opening the door to the development of a nuclear weapon as a hedge against the threat of regime change. On Wednesday, Iran launched multiple ballistic missiles at bases housing U.S. forces in Iraq. The visually spectacular attacks resulted in no casualties, and it is possible that the strikes were designed with that outcome in mind. Following the attacks, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif tweeted “Iran took & concluded appropriate measures…We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression.” In remarks on January 9, President Trump made it clear that the U.S. response to the strikes would be increased economic sanctions, rather than a military response. For the moment at least, it appears that the chain of escalations emanating from the death of Soleimani has been broken by mutual acts of restraint by both the U.S. and Iran.
Davis stresses the restraint is not some permanent state of affairs. To back away from the escalatory spiral since Trump left the JCPOA nuclear agreement will require constructive measures to reduce the tension.
The leaders of Iranian-backed paramilitary groups in Iraq have agreed to put their differences aside and back Hadi al-Amiri as the new chairman of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) as part of a wider plan brokered by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to quell tensions between the groups and create a “united resistance” to US troops in the country. ...
Most of the leaders then flew to Tehran on Sunday, before moving onto the Iranian city of Qom on Monday where they also met with influential Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in a significant display of Shia unity.
Iraq is majority Shi'a. But that doesn't mean there aren't real tensions between Iraqi and Iranian Shi'a:
Iran is facing unprecedented tension in its relationship with the United States after it bombed Iraqi military bases hosting US forces last week, in retaliation for the killings of Soleimani and Muhandis.
In addition, the relationship between Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shia community in Iraq, and [Iranian Ayatollah] Khamenei has deteriorated significantly because of the Iranian supreme leader's insistence on using Iraq as a proxy battleground for the confrontation with the US, and over the role of Iranian-backed armed groups in the killing and intimidation of Iraqi anti-government protesters.
Jeremi Suri has some observations about a couple of important turning points in Amrican foreign policy in recent decades in The Long Rise and Sudden Fall of American DiplomacyForeign Policy 04/17/2019. Suri is commenting on a book by a former ambassdor to Jordan and foreign policy official, William Burns, currently president of the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Burns thought the Clinton Administration's decision to expand NATO was poorly conceived and inadequately thought out:
The militarization of U.S. diplomacy began, according to Burns’s account, when President Bill Clinton pushed for rapid NATO expansion into the former Soviet bloc, despite prior U.S. commitments to the contrary (as confirmed by Burns in his memoir) and strong Russian objections. Although Clinton offered strong personal support to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he failed to address the growing sense of insecurity and grievance within Russia. It appeared that the United States was muscling into Russian geopolitical space, brandishing guns and dollars. Washington offered little to assure concerned Russians, other than continued aid to a drunk, pro-American figure in the Kremlin.
The former Soviet bloc states had good reason to seek NATO membership, but the United States needed to do more to accommodate Russian fears. Diplomacy of this kind received little attention among Clinton’s impatient advisors. Burns, then the U.S. minister-counselor for political affairs in Russia, recounts: “Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst ... It was wishful thinking, however, to believe that we could open the door to NATO membership without incurring some lasting cost with a Russia coping with its own historic insecurities.”
It's too late to put that genie back in the bottle. But the post-1989 US foreign policy was strong on arrogance and short on realistic views of Russia.
And he cites Burns' view of the foreign policy disaster known as the Iraq War.
The United States isolated itself, antagonized allies and adversaries, and diverted its resources to a lengthy military occupation that further destabilized the region. The winner of the war was Iran, which saw a regional rival defeated and found new influence in Iraq. The United States was a clear loser, as the “war in Iraq sucked the oxygen out of the administration’s foreign policy agenda.” Mired in Iraq, facing opposition around the globe, Washington found its diplomatic leverage diminished in almost every region. Burns recounts how Russian President Vladimir Putin took advantage of this situation by throwing his weight around in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Southeastern Europe. The United States had cornered itself. [my emphasis]
Sometimes commentators refer to the Iraq War as an unforced error. Unforeced disaster would be more appropriate.
Most damaging, the United States never recovered the diplomatic capital lost in Iraq. Burns recounts many skilled U.S. efforts to contain Russia and denuclearize Libya and Iran, but from military intervention to drone warfare Washington consistently “overrelied on American hard power to achieve policy aims and ambitions.” Even critics of the Iraq War presumed the United States had underused or misused military power; they did not address the diplomatic deficit. U.S. leaders failed to educate the public about the importance of forging compromise abroad, and they frequently encouraged more skepticism toward diplomacy. This was most evident during the Barack Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, when members of Congress worked to undermine sensitive negotiations while they were still in process, calling recklessly for military intervention instead. [my emphasis]
One of the poor assumptions behind the war on terror in the context of which the Cheney-Bush Administration justified the Iraq War was to conceive of terrorism as a problem of state-sponsored terrorism. Paul Pilar notes that this bad assumption has been unfortunately persistent (The Pensacola Shooting and the Misconceiving of TerrorismResponsible Statecraft 12/09/2019):
State sponsorship of terrorism has dropped significantly over the past three decades. At least that is true of governments either directly perpetrating or instigating terrorist operations. A persistent problem of states and terrorism involves the less direct malevolent effects of what certain states do, and Saudi Arabia is Exhibit A in that problem. It is no accident that fifteen of the nineteen men who carried out the mother of all of international terrorist attacks — 9/11 — were Saudis. ...
The Trump administration has put the latest attack, and terrorism in general, in the framework of its policy toward the Middle East, which rigidly takes sides in regional rivalries and is built around unrelenting hostility toward Iran. ...
The oft-repeated mantra about Iran being the “number one state sponsor of terrorism” is an anachronism. It was applicable in years past, when fifty U.S. diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran and in subsequent years when the Iranian regime conducted serial assassinations of exiled dissidents. That behavior stopped years ago. ... Iran has been heavily involved, especially in Iraq, in combating the most ominous terrorist movement of recent years - Islamic State - and has been the victim of major Islamic State attacks within Iran. [my emphasis]
If National Security Adviser John Bolton wants anything, it's are with Iran.
But as Joe Cirincione explains in Bolton’s Big Iran Con DefenseOne 01/12/2019:
Trump’s mendacity may encourage Bolton’s, but he needs precious little prompting. As the secretary of state continues this week and next on his overlapping anti-Iran tour of the Middle East, we should brace for a stream of false claims every bit as strong as the ones coming from the White House.
In particular, we should spend at least as much time fact-checking their claims as we do those of the youngest member of Congress [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], whose exaggerations may prove embarrassing, but are unlikely to be fatal. Bolton’s and Pompeo’s falsehoods are paving the way for a Middle East war that will make the dispute over the wall with Mexico look like a border dust-up.
I would say his comparison in that last sentence understates the seriousness of what Bolton is pushing for. But there are various kinds of Middle East wars that don't necesssarily involve an invasion of Iran. The neocon plague of promoting war in the Greater Middle East has done way too much damage already.
Pillar comments that Pompeo's speech "seemed written to please an audience of one—President Donald Trump - along with the domestic political base to which Trump’s own rhetoric is designed to appeal." He notes that a Pompeo's advocated "that nearly everything in U.S. foreign policy ought to be subordinated to confronting Iran."
