AN year after a US military operation freed this world from Iranian terrorist general Qasem Soleimani, the same tired voices are repeating the same tired message, even on the eve of his return to power: “The Trump administration is on the brink of war with Iran! “
“Trump is a very injured and cornered animal in an endgame scenario. He still has a few weeks left and we know that he is capable of extremely erratic behavior, ”said Professor Danny Postel of Northwestern University. After the events of last Wednesday, it is difficult to challenge Postel’s assessment of the president’s psyche. But I still have many doubts that dragging the country into war is at the top of the president’s list of tasks.
Trita Parsi, spokesman for the Islamic Republic of Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statistics, also weighed in predictably irresponsibly. Parsi speculates that Trump may lead the US to a war with Iran to placate Sheldon Adelson (who has passed away), evangelicals (whom he classifies as being interested in Israel’s security only to provoke the events of the Book of Revelation ), and other supporters of the Jewish state. Forget that Trump has always liked to criticize the “eternal wars” in the Middle East; Jews and Christians will make you wage a holy war in Persia on their behalf!
Parsi’s theory is as offensive as it is unconvincing. Deterrence, not war, has always been the goal of the Trump administration’s approach to curbing the dishonest state. But he showed no signs of retreating from his conspiratorial thinking, which is motivated by a stubborn pro-regime ideology. On a tweet on January 3, he claimed to have spoken to a “former US military officer” who told him that war with Iran prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration was “likely”. Idrees Ali, a Reuters correspondent covering the Pentagon, answered concisely that “this is not the current thinking in the armed forces.”
The emphasis on deterrence, in a different way, also goes back to the Obama administration, which, in search of something that could at least be considered a remarkable foreign policy achievement, did everything in its power to sign an agreement, any business with the Iranians. The Obama team ended up succeeding, but their desperation led to the capitulation known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Agreement (JCPOA), which released billions of dollars for the Iranians, did nothing to contain its global terror network and, at best , just delayed its path to a nuclear weapon.
Worst of all, none of the non-Iranian signatories to the agreement was willing to apply it when the Iranians inevitably decided to break its terms. Before being finalized, JCPOA opponents predicted that this would happen. They proved they were right this fall, when France, Germany and the United Kingdom voted to allow an end to the arms embargo on Iran, despite well-documented breaches of the deal by the Islamic Republic. Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres was forced to acknowledge these violations in 2017, when he handed the Security Council a report detailing Iran’s supply of ballistic missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen. Two years later, in July 2019, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke out and announced that Iran would break the terms of the JCPOA. As noted by Zachary Laub and Kali Robinson, of the Council on Foreign Relations, Tehran did so by exceeding “the agreed limits for its low-enriched uranium stockpile”. That November, the regime announced that it would also begin to inject uranium gas into the centrifuges at its nuclear facility in Fordow.
To excuse this short-sighted deal, rapprochement with Iran should generally be treated as an article of faith in a quasi-religion, and the only alternative to it should be considered a bloody war in the Middle East. This false choice has been repeated numerous times by the Obama administration and President Obama himself. In a speech, Obama said that “Congress’s rejection of this agreement leaves any US government that is absolutely committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon with an option – another war in the Middle East. . . . I am stating a fact. ”Convenient, that.
Even now, while Parsi and his gang insist that the Trump administration is responsible for escalating tensions, Iran is leveling off its nuclear program. Earlier this month, the regime announced that it would begin enriching uranium at the 20 percent level, almost enough to produce a nuclear weapon. He also stated that, if it is to enter into a nuclear agreement again with the United States and other JCPOA signatories, there can be no instant sanction clauses. In other words, Iran does not want to be held responsible if it violates this second hypothetical deal, as it did with the first.
No war is going on with Iran, and despite the media narrative, the Trump administration has never been particularly close to opening hostilities with the main sponsoring state of terrorism – even after the Soleimani operation. If the war broke out in any way, however, we can only imagine that Parsi et al. would blame the United States, despite the Iranian regime’s support for radical Islamic terrorism, blatant contempt for the JCPOA, efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, a desire to use those weapons to threaten or annihilate Israel and horrific abuses of its own people. And there could hardly be a more compelling accusation than that.