Pompeo
and Netanyahu Paved a Path to War With Iran, and They’re Pushing Trump Again
The administration of
President Donald Trump may escape the most recent conflict with Iran without
war, however, a dangerous escalation is just over the horizon. And as before,
the key factors driving the belligerence are not outraged, Iraqi militia leaders
or their allies in Iran, but Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to draw the US
into a military confrontation with Iran.
Throughout the fall of
2019, Netanyahu ordered a series of Israeli strikes against Iranian allies in
Iraq and against Lebanese Hezbollah units. He and Pompeo hoped the attacks
would provoke a reaction from their targets that could provide a tripwire
outright war with Iran. As could have been expected, corporate US media missed
the story, perhaps because it failed to reinforce the universally accepted
narrative of a hyper-aggressive Iran emboldened by Trump’s failure to “deter”
it following Iran’s shoot-down of a U.S. drone in June, and an alleged Iranian
attack on a Saudi oil facility in September.
Pompeo and John Bolton set
the stage for the tripwire strategy in May 2019 with a statement by national
security adviser John Bolton citing “troubling and escalatory indications and
warnings,” implying an Iranian threat without providing concrete details. That the vague language echoed a previous vow by Bolton that “any attack” by Iran or
“proxy” forces “on United States interests or on those of our allies will be
met with unrelenting force.”
Then came a campaign of
leaks to major news outlet suggesting that Iran was planning attacks on the US
military personnel. The day after Bolton’s statement, the Wall Street
Journal reported that the unnamed US
officials cited “US intelligence” showing that Iran “drew up plans to target the US
forces in Iraq and possibly Syria, to orchestrate attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb
strait near Yemen through proxies and in the Persian Gulf with its own armed
drones….”
The immediate aim of this
campaign was to gain Trump’s approval for contingency plans for a possible war
with Iran that included the option of sending as many
120,000 US troops in the region. Trump balked at such
war-planning, however, complaining privately that Bolton and
Pompeo was pushing him into a war with Iran. Following Iran’s shoot-down of
the US drone over the Strait of Hormuz on June 20, Pompeo and Bolton suggested
the option of killing Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in retaliation. But Trump
refused to sign off on the assassination of Iran’s top general unless Iran
killed an American first, according to
current and former officials.
From that point on, the
provocation strategy was focused on trying to trigger an Iranian reaction that
would involve a US casualty. That’s when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu interjected himself and his military as a central player in the
drama. From July 19 through August 20, the Israeli army carried out five
strikes against Iraqi militias allied with Iran, blowing up four weapons depots
and killing as many Shiite militiamen and Iranian officers, according to
press accounts.
The Israeli bombing
escalated on August 25, when two strikes on the brigade headquarters of a
pro-Iranian militia and on a militia convoy killed the brigade commander and
six other militiamen, and a drone strike on
Hezbollah’s headquarters in south Beirut blew the windows out of one
of Hezbollah’s media offices.
Netanyahu and Pompeo
sabotage Trump and Macron’s attempt at diplomacy
Behind those strikes was Netanyahu’s
sense of alarm over Trump toying with the idea of seeking
negotiations with Iran. Netanyahu had likely learned about Trump’s moves toward
détente from Pompeo, who had long been his primary contact in the
administration. On August 26, French President Emanuel Macron revealed that he
was working to broker a Trump-Rouhani meeting. Netanyahu grumbled about the
prospect of U.S.-Iranian talks “several times” with his security
cabinet the day before launching the strikes.
Two retired senior Israeli
generals, Gen. Amos Yadlin and Gen. Assaf Oron, criticized those
strikes for increasing the likelihood of harsh retaliation by Iran or one
of its regional partners. The generals complained that Netanyahu’s attacks were
“designed to prod [Iran] into a hasty response” and thus end Trump’s flirtation
with talking to Iran. That much was obviously true, but Pompeo and Netanyahu
also knew that provoking an attack by Iran or one of its allies might cause one
or more of the American casualties they sought. And once American blood was
spilled, Trump would have no means to resist authorizing a major escalation.
Kataib Hezbollah and other
pro-Iran Iraqi militias blamed the United States for the wave of lethal Israeli
attacks on their fighters. These militias responded in September by launching a series of rocket
attacks on Iraqi government bases where US troops were present. They also
struck targets in the vicinity of the US Embassy.
The problem for Netanyahu
and Pompeo, however, was that none of those strikes killed an American. What’s
more, US intelligence officials knew from NSA monitoring
of communications between the IRGC and the militias that Iran
had explicitly forbidden direct attacks on US personnel.
Netanyahu was growing
impatient. For several days in late October and early November, he met with his
national security cabinet to discuss a new Israeli attack to precipitate a possible war
with Iran, according to reports by former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. Oren
hinted at how a war with Iran might start. ‘[P]erhaps Israel miscalculates,” he
suggested, “hitting a particularly sensitive target,” which, in his view, could
spark “a big war between Israel and Iran.”
But on December 27, before
Netanyahu could put such a strategy into action, the situation changed
dramatically. A barrage of rockets slammed into an Iraqi base near Kirkuk where
US military personnel were stationed, killing a US military contractor.
Suddenly, Pompeo had the opening he needed. At a meeting the following day,
Pompeo led Trump to believe that Iranian “proxies” had attacked the base, and
pressed him to “reestablish
deterrence” with Iran by carrying out a military
response.
In fact, US and Iraqi
officials on the spot had reached no such conclusion, and the investigation led
by the head of intelligence for the Iraqi federal police at the base was just
beginning that same day. But Pompeo and his allies, Defense Secretary Mark
Esper and Chairman of Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark A Milley, were not interested in
waiting for its conclusion.
A deception brings the US
and Iran to the brink of war
The results of a
subsequent Iraqi investigation revealed that the
rocket barrage had been launched from a Sunni area of Kirkuk with a strong
Islamic State presence and that IS fighters had carried out three attacks not
far from the base on Iraqi forces stationed there in the previous ten days. US
signals intercept found no evidence that Iraqi militias had shifted from their
policy of avoiding American casualties at all costs.
Kept in the dark by Pompeo
about these crucial facts, Trump agreed to launch five airstrikes against
Kataib Hezbollah and another pro-Iran militia at five locations in Iraq and
Syria that killed 25 militiamen and wounded 51. He may have also agreed in
principle to the killing of Soleimani when the opportunity presented itself.
Iran responded to the
attacks on its Iraqi militia allies by approving a violent protest at the US
Embassy in Baghdad January 31. The demonstrators did not penetrate the embassy
building itself and were abruptly halted the same day. But Pompeo managed to
persuade Trump to authorize the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s
second most powerful figure, presumably by hammering on the theme of
“reestablishing deterrence” with Iran.
Soleimani was not only the
second most powerful man in Iran and the main figure in its foreign policy; he
was idolized by millions of the most strongly nationalist citizens of the
country. Killing him in a drone strike was an open invitation to the military
confrontation Netanyahu and Pompeo so desperately sought.
During the crucial week
from December 28 through January 4, while Pompeo was pressing Trump to
retaliate against Iran not just once but twice, it was clear that he was
coordinating closely with Netanyahu. During that single week, he spoke by phone
with Netanyahu on three separate occasions.
What Pompeo and Netanyahu
could not have anticipated was that Iran’s missile attack on the US sector of
Iraq’s sprawling al-Asad airbase in retaliation would be so precise that it scored direct
hits on six US targets without killing a single American. (The US
service members were saved in part because the rockets were fired after the
Iraqi government had passed on a
warning from Iran to prepare for it). Because no American was killed in
the strike, Trump again decided against further retaliation.
Towards another provocation
Although Pompeo and
Netanyahu failed to ignite a military conflict with Iran, there is good reason
to believe that they will try again before both are forced to leave their
positions of power.
In an article for the
Atlantic last November, former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, channeled
Netanyahu when he declared it would be “better
for conflict [with Iran] to occur during the current [Trump] administration,
which can be counted on to provide Israel with the three sources of American
assistance it traditionally receives in wartime,” than to “wait until later.”
Oren was not the only
Israeli official to suggest that Israeli is likely to go even further in
strikes against Iranian and Iranian allies targets in 2020. After listening to
Israeli army chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi speak in late December, Haaretz military
correspondent Amos Harel reported that the Israeli army
chief conveyed the clear impression that a “more serious confrontation with
Iran in the coming year as an almost unquestionable necessity.” His interviews
with Israeli military and political figures further indicated that Israel would
“intensity its efforts to hit Iran in the northern area.”
Shockingly, Pompeo has
exploited the Coronavirus pandemic to impose even harsher sanctions on Iran
while intimidating foreign businesses to prevent urgently needed medical
supplies from entering the country. The approaching presidential election gives
both Pompeo and Netanyahu a powerful reason to plot another strike or a series
of strikes aimed at drawing the US into a potential Israeli confrontation with
Iran.
Activists and members of
Congress concerned about keeping the US out of a war with Iran must be acutely
aware of the danger and ready to respond decisively when the provocation
occurs.
Gareth Porter, an
investigative historian, and journalist specializing in US national security
policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for
articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is Manufactured Crisis:
the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can be contacted
at porter.gareth50@gmail.com. Reprinted from The Grayzone with the author’s
permission.
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