WAR. (NOT MY) pres drumpf / trump, better known as Cadet Bone Spurs from his Vietnam War days, just might get us in the war to end all wars (and life) if this escalates any further. It is not inconceivable for this to progress to a massive Iranian attack on Israel, an American retaliatory attack on Iran, Russia and the prc responding militarily in defense of Iran. The possibility of this scenario is real, the need for the American people to DEMAND congress to reclaim their control of war powers and the insist (NOT MY) pres drumpf / trump get approval from congress before any further military action against Iran and it's proxies. This from Playing For Change and Mother Jones.....
War/No More Trouble | Playing for Change | Song Around The World feat. Bono
Here we go again.
Shortly after the news broke that a US airstrike in Baghdad ordered by President Donald Trump had killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, Ari Fleischer went on Fox News and proclaimed, “I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani.”
Here we go again.
Fleischer was press secretary for President George W. Bush when the Bush-Cheney administration deployed a long stretch of false statements and lies—Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda! Saddam had WMDs! Saddam intended to use WMDs against the United States! Saddam’s defeat would lead to peace and democracy in Iraq and throughout the region!—to grease the way to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. In that position, Fleischer was a key spokesperson for the war. Prior to the invasion, he promised the war would lead to a bright future: “Once the Iraqi people see that Saddam and those around him will be removed from power, they’ll welcome freedom, they’ll be a liberated people.” Instead, Iraq and the region were wracked with destabilization and death that continues to this day. About 200,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in the chaos and violence the Bush-Cheney invasion unleashed, and 4,500 US soldiers were killed in their war.
Back then, Fleischer was just one of many cheerleaders for the Iraq war inside and outside the administration. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush-Cheney officials (including Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney), neocon pundits, Capitol Hill lawmakers, and some liberal pundits were beating the drums of war, inciting the public with claims that Saddam was a direct and immediate threat to the United States. They insisted that a war with Iraq would be quick, easy, and cheap and turn Iraq and the Middle East into a bastion of democracy brimming with gratitude to the United States. They were wrong, they were misguided, they were arrogant, and in some cases they outright lied to whip up fear and boost popular support for the war. With Trump’s attack in Baghdad prompting talk about another US war in the Middle East, it’s a good time to remember those who misled the public prior to the Iraq war, so if they now try to participate in the national discourse about Trump’s potential war with Iran, we won’t get fooled again. At least not by them.
At the top of this list, of course, are the key architects and salespeople of that war: Bush, Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. None of these people should be given a podium—unless they come clean with the mother of all mea culpas. Colin Powell, the secretary of state at the time, may be a slightly different case. He became the No. 1 pitchman for the war, delivering an important speech at the United Nations weeks before the invasion to lay out the case for military intervention, but he was widely known at the time to be hesitant about the assault. He still has not disavowed his support for the attack, but he did concede in 2015 that the Bush-Cheney administration made “terrible strategic mistakes” during the war.
Whether or not the Bush-Cheney gang ride into the current picture, we will be seeing some of the same commentators from 2003 who paved the path to war. Here are a few to watch out for:
Sean Hannity: The Fox News loudmouth was pushing the same bombastic style in 2003. A month before the invasion, he declared, “We’re going to go in and we’re going to liberate this country in a few weeks and it’s going to be over very quickly. No, it’s going to be over very quickly. And what I’m going to tell you here is, you’re going to find, I predict, mass graves. We’re going to open up those…gulags and those prisons and you’re going to hear stories of rape and torture and misery, and then we’re going to find all of the weapons of mass destruction.” In the aftermath of the Soleimani attack—no surprise—he hailed Trump. As the top propagandist at Trump State TV, he will undoubtedly blow a similar horn this time.
David Brooks: Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, Brooks, then a writer for the Weekly Standard, participated in a panel discussion and summed up his support for the war by asking: Don’t you believe the people of Iraq desire democracy just as much as we do? It was really that simple for him. Days prior to the attack, he penned a column poking fun at people who approached the question of invading Iraq as a complex matter, and he praised Bush for being “resolute.” Bush’s manner seemed to matter more to him than pondering the possible consequences of the upcoming war. Now at his perch at the New York Times, will Brooks once again try to make the simplistic seem sophisticated?
Thomas Friedman. The big-think columnist of the New York Times, Friedman eventually took an anti-intellectual—and wrong-headed—approach to the Iraq war. Before the military action, he cautioned Bush not to “take the country to war on the wings of a lie,” though he argued there was a compelling argument for invading Iraq. In an interview soon after the invasion, Friedman claimed the attack was a legitimate response to 9/11 (never mind that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11): “What we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world…and burst that [terrorism] bubble. We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand…Well, suck on this.’” For years, American soldiers and their families ended up paying the price for Friedman’s suck-on-this war—unfortunately, without much to show for their sacrifice.
John Bolton: Trump’s gone-but-not-forgotten national security adviser has long been an advocate of US military action in the Middle East. He essentially endorsed an Israeli nuclear strike against Iran in 2009. In 2002, as a senior State Department official, he peddled the case for war against Iraq. In one interview, he noted, “We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq,” and he echoed the Bush-Cheney administration lines that the Iraqi people would “welcome the overthrow of a dictatorial regime” and that the US role in a post-invasion Iraq would be “fairly minimal.” After the Soleimani assassination, Bolton sent congratulations to the US military and tweeted that he hopes “this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.” He seemed to be looking forward to something bigger.
Bill Kristol: The editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox News contributor at the time, Kristol was the drum major of the neocon go-to-war crowd in 2002 and 2003. He claimed that in an effort to obtain nuclear weapons, Saddam was “past that finish line! He’s past the finish line!” He declared that a war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.” Kristol maintained that “we can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy.” He asserted, “We’ll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction.” He also said, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” He was repeatedly wrong, very wrong. These days, Kristol is a passionate and committed never-Trumper whose sincere and heartfelt opposition to the president seemingly led to the demise of his Weekly Standard. Will he apply his critical view of Trump to a possible Trump war with Iran? An active force on Twitter, Kristol, whose mother recently died, has yet to tweet about the latest developments in Iran.
The Washington Post editorial page: The paper’s editorial board was a loud and steady supporter of a war with Iraq in the months before the invasion. It cited 9/11 as a reason, though there was no evidence Saddam had been involved in that horrific attack on the United States. After Powell made his UN presentation, the paper editorialized, “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.” Actually, intelligence and weapons experts still had questions about Saddam and WMDs—as reported within the Washington Post‘s own news stories. But the editorial board paid no mind to its reporters. In the six months prior to the invasion, the Post ran editorials supporting the war at least 27 times.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page: A month before the invasion, the arch-conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal opined, “It will be the nasty weapons and the cheering Iraqis the coalition finds when it liberates the country.” Nope. The WSJ editorial page repeatedly cited as a source exiled Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress fed misinformation and disinformation to reporters to build a case against Saddam. Weeks after the invasion, the editorial board praised the war as a “success.” Yes, a success.
Judith Miller: As a reporter for the New York Times, Miller wrote numerous stories before the invasion that hyped the threat from Saddam, often relying on sources fed to her by Chalabi’s INC. For these efforts, her former colleague Maureen Dowd dubbed Miller a “woman of mass destruction.” In 2015, Miller defended her reporting by saying she had been at the time “accurately conveying wrong information.” These days, Miller is a Fox News contributor and may well be called up to provide commentary on Iran. Will she once again convey wrong information?
James Woolsey: Following 9/11, a circle of national security hawks embraced and promoted a bizarre and convoluted conspiracy theory that basically held that Saddam was behind the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and other targets. And these so-called experts immediately began to push for military action against Iraq—a policy many of them had supported long before 9/11. Wolfowitz was part of this group. So was Woolsey, a former CIA director. Wolfowitz even sent Woolsey to England to press the British government for supposed evidence showing that Saddam was the mastermind of 9/11. (There was no such evidence.) Woolsey also pushed the theory—advanced by Cheney—that Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before 9/11. (This was not true either.) And Woolsey championed an Iraqi defector who claimed to have information on WMDs in Iraq, though this defector had been judged a fabricator by US intelligence. Woolsey was a walking intelligence failure throughout that period. These days, he freely offers his opinion on national security matters. On Wednesday—prior to the Soleimani airstrike—Woolsey appeared on the conservative Newsmax TV and said, “We ought to target all of the facilities of the Revolutionary Guard.”
Newt Gingrich: The former House speaker was a fierce proponent of blasting Saddam in the aftermath of 9/11. Days after the attack, he exclaimed, ”If we don’t use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster.” And he continued as an enthusiastic proponent of US military action against Iraq. As another Fox regular these days—who comments on just about anything and everything—he, too, may see action as a wartime pundit. Gingrich was quick to tweet-support the airstrike against Soleimani: “It hurt the dictatorship profoundly while avoiding wholesale combat. Well done!”
There are plenty of other conservatives and hawks who sold and justified the Iraq war, before and after the invasion, with misrepresentations, falsehoods, or dumb ideas who might pop up on television screens, in op-ed columns, or on Facebook and Twitter in the coming days. But keep a careful watch on those listed above—and any Bush-Cheney alumni.
A few Iraq war hawks have acknowledged they were wrong. These people deserve a different sort of consideration. None of the unreformed cheerleaders of 2003 should be heeded now, but those willing to admit they blew it demonstrate that progress is possible. And that ought to be encouraged. Most notable among this small group is Max Boot, a longtime conservative foreign policy thinker. In his 2018 book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, he wrote, “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” After the Soleimani attack, Boot retweeted an article that warned Trump’s move and further war could cause a nightmare. And on CNN, he noted, “There’s no question that killing Qassem Soleimani was justified…The question is, was it wise? Do we know what comes next? Do we have a game plan for managing this growing confrontation with Iran?”
David Frum, a prominent conservative anti-Trumper, also falls into the category of the self-rehabbed hawk. As a speechwriter in the Bush-Cheney White House, he penned Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech that placed a bull’s-eye on Iraq. But last year, he wrote of the Iraq war, “We were ignorant, arrogant, and unprepared, and we unleashed human suffering that did no good for anyone: not for Americans, not for Iraqis, not for the region. Almost two decades later, the damage to America’s standing in the world from the Iraq War has still not been repaired, let alone that war’s economic and human costs to the United States and the Middle East.” As for the prospect of war with Iran, he observed, “The project of a war with Iran is so crazy, it remains incredible that Donald Trump’s administration could truly be premeditating it. But on the off, off chance that it is, here’s a word of caution from a veteran of the George W. Bush administration: Don’t do it.”
Frum and Boot have learned from their own mistakes. Too many other war hawks from the 2000s, though, merely continued on, facing no reckoning. These pundits and peddlers of destruction deserve no serious place at the media table these days. After all, wars—especially stupid wars—ought to have consequences for those who help make them happen.
JUNE 26, 2019
Costly, protracted, and likely leading to an indecisive outcome. Sound familiar?
Update: On January 2, Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in Iraq by a US drone strike, increasing the risk of further military conflict between the United States and Iran. While tensions have risen dramatically since this story was first published in June 2019, the below scenario of what shape a war with Iran would take remains worrisomely plausible.
The simmering conflict between the United States and Iran could become a war in much the same way Ernest Hemingway once described going bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly.” Weeks of escalating tension have left the two longtime adversaries at the brink with hard liners on both sides paving the way toward a military clash.
“Any spark in the region could set off this fire,” says Joe Cirincione, a nuclear weapons policy expert and former adviser to the State Department.
On the campaign trail, Trump frequently criticized America’s interventions in Iraq and Libya as a pointless waste of time, money, and lives—his earlier support of the Iraq invasion notwithstanding—and even described Syria in January as nothing more than “sand and death.” Trump clearly has no desire to mire the US in another foreign war, but surrounded by aides who are cheerleading for a confrontation with Iran, Trump’s blustering style could lead, intentionally or not, to a war more destructive and sprawling than the ones he condemned as a presidential candidate.
Here’s how such a conflict could start and what it might look like:
It might not take much for Iran to cross Trump’s red line—whatever that is.
Last week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite component of the Iranian military, shot down an American drone, “in large part to prove they could do it,” according to Iranian officials who spoke with the New York Times. Trump’s initial response was harshly critical of the regime. “Iran made a very big mistake!” Trump tweeted on June 20. Hours later, he reversed himself and seemed to suggest the attack was literally a mistake. “I find it hard to believe it was intentional,” he told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. The shifting meanings “allow different people to hear what they want,” Maggie Haberman, of the New York Times, observed on Twitter.
These contradictions, Trump’s habit of embellishing and outright lying, and the different pressures exerted by his more hawkish advisers make it difficult to determine where he will draw a firm line regarding Iran. National security adviser John Bolton, who with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and CIA director Gina Haspel, reportedly urged Trump to strike Iran last week, promised last month that the US would “respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.” This week, Trump narrowed his focus but upped the stakes. “Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force,” he tweeted. “In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration.”
....The wonderful Iranian people are suffering, and for no reason at all. Their leadership spends all of its money on Terror, and little on anything else. The U.S. has not forgotten Iran’s use of IED’s & EFP’s (bombs), which killed 2000 Americans, and wounded many more...
....Iran’s very ignorant and insulting statement, put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration. No more John Kerry & Obama!
41.4K people are talking about this
It is not clear whether Trump’s red line refers to American assets or people, or whether it extends to Iran’s conventional army, its specialized Revolutionary Guards, or the proxies Tehran trains and funds across the Middle East, including the Houthi rebels in Yemen and several Shia militias in Iraq. These groups vary in their level of obedience to the Islamic Republic and have clashed with American troops in the past, with the Pentagon estimating in April that Iranian proxies have killed at least 603 Americans in Iraq since 2003. “Especially in Iraq or Syria, you could have a US fatality,” Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, told reporters on a call last week. “It could happen intentionally if Iran feels squeezed or desperate. It could happen inadvertently because Iran doesn’t have complete control over its proxies.”
A conventional war isn’t likely, but if it happens, Iran has some strategic advantages.
Iran’s undisputed military strength is in its diverse and rapidly-improving array of ballistic missiles, which it has supplied frequently to its allies across the region. One of Trump’s persistent criticisms of the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration and other nations was that it did not cover Iran’s missiles and the regime has repeatedly countered international efforts to limit their production in recent years. In a war with Iran or one of its proxies, the United States would have to grapple with missiles capable of traveling at least 3,000 kilometers, according to the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Iran doesn’t have a lot of advanced aircraft,” says Thomas Karako, the project’s director. “Where they’ve put their money is in missiles that can target nearby bases.”
Seventeen years ago, a $250 million war game conducted by the US military pondered the same possible conflict. That exercise, conducted in the lead-up to the American invasion of Iraq, simulated a war in the Persian Gulf, where American troops were promptly defeated. Nineteen US ships sank, including an aircraft carrier, according to political scientist Micah Zenko, who highlighted the war game in his book, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. Nearly two decades later, the circumstances have changed but the potential cost of another Gulf War remains high, particularly because of Iran’s continuing ability to navigate the narrow Strait of Hormuz.
The US Navy may far outstrip Iran in its number of sailors and diversity of carriers and boats, but the location of any maritime conflict would significantly benefit Iran, which prefers to fight the US as a scrappy underdog on its own turf. Iran has already demonstrated its ability to escalate tensions in the Strait by bombing at least six oil tankers in recent weeks. If the Strait remained open to commercial traffic, ships belonging to the United States or its allies would be vulnerable to attacks, especially if Iranian vessels were able to disguise themselves as civilian transports. The Strait’s narrow shipping lanes—only 1.6 nautical miles wide at certain points—would further constrain how quickly American war boats would be able to respond to attacks from Iranian submarines.
“You’re looking for small boats hidden potentially among plenty of civilian boats in an area that has a lot of commercial traffic,” says John Allen Gay, co-author of the book War With Iran: Political, Military, and Economic Consequences, making it difficult for the US “to achieve a really decisive result.”
A conflict could escalate to the entire region.
War with Iran by necessity would almost have to involve its regional neighbors and adversaries, including Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Russia. Iranian proxies could support Tehran by targeting US troops in Iraq or continuing to use their perch in Yemen to bomb Saudi Arabia, which is America’s close ally and Iran’s sectarian enemy. Then depending on the route American bombers take to reach Iran, they run the risk of angering Iran’s neighbors. “You’re either going to fly in over Iraq or fly in over parts of Syria which has very good air defenses,” Gay says. “That’s where the best Russian air defenses are.” Routing the attack through Israel and Lebanon might provide a workaround, but that could draw these countries into the conflict.
Then there’s the economic element. Oil prices would soar if the Strait of Hormuz were closed to commercial traffic. The impact at home might not be immediately felt, but the administration would likely want to avoid a hike in gas prices right before an election year. “In the event of a bigger conflict, at minimum you’re going to see a spike,” Gay says. Global oil prices have remained steady in recent weeks, in part due to the trade war between the US and China weakening demand. But after Iran shot down the drone, oil prices reached the highest point in weeks.
Trump has no exit strategy.
It’s easy to compare Trump’s actions regarding North Korea—ratchet up the rhetoric, saber-rattle for weeks, only to veer toward diplomacy—to what is happening with Iran. Several media outlets have done just that as this crisis with Iran has ballooned. There’s one crucial difference: in North Korea, decades of diplomatic outreach had failed to yield a preexisting deal, but with Iran a multilateral nuclear deal had been reached—and Trump ripped it up. And then he unilaterally expanded the terms of the debate way beyond the already difficult topic of Iran’s nuclear program. Trump and Pompeo have made 12 demands for Iran to meet—including ending its support for all regional proxies and halting its development of nuclear-capable missiles—which in their totality amount to what Wendy Sherman, the lead negotiator for Obama’s deal, told reporters the Iranians view as “not just regime change, but regime overthrow.” Then there is the open question of the war’s objectives: To stop a nuclear program, to attempt to force Tehran’s acceptance of all these demands, or to destroy the current regime and somehow remake the country?
Iran continues to refuse Trump’s offers to negotiate, even as his administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy has devastated Iran’s oil trade. As part of its effort to eliminate Iranian oil exports, the Trump administration announced in April that it would no longer grant waivers to eight countries that had previously been allowed to import Iran’s oil temporarily, sparking immediate reprisals from Turkey and China. Roughly half of state spending in Iran is tied to oil revenues.
“That’s the Iranian red line,” says Gregory Aftandilian, a former Middle East analyst at the State Department who now teaches at Boston University. “Until America lifts the oil embargo, why should we enter into talks?”
Trump showed no signs of backing down on Tuesday when a reporter asked if he had an exit strategy planned in the event of war breaking out. “You are not going to need an exit strategy,” he replied. “I don’t need exit strategies.”
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