Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
How Trump's Iran Decision Invites War
October 12, 2017
By decertifying the Iran-nuke deal, President Trump would put another
Mideast war of choice on the table, but war on Iran is really the choice of
Israel and Saudi Arabia wanting the U.S. to do the killing and dying, as
Trita Parsi explains.
By Trita Parsi
Make no mistake: We do not have a crisis over the Iran nuclear deal. It is
working and everyone from Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson to the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services to the
International Atomic Energy Agency agree: Iran is adhering to the deal.
President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at
the United Nations General Assembly (Official White House Photo by Shealah
Craighead)
But President Trump is about to take a working deal and turn it into a
crisis - an international crisis that very likely can lead to war. While the
decertification of the Iran deal that Trump is scheduled to announce on
Friday in and of itself doesn't collapse the deal, it does trigger a process
that increases the risk of war in the following five ways.
1. If the deal collapses, so do the restrictions on Iran's nuclear program
The nuclear deal, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) took two
very bad scenarios off the table: It blocked all of Iran's paths to a
nuclear bomb and it prevented war with Iran. By killing the deal, Trump is
putting both of those bad scenarios back on the table.
As I describe in my book Losing an Enemy - Obama, Iran and the triumph of
Diplomacy, it was the very real danger of a military conflict that drove the
Barack Obama administration to become so dedicated to find a diplomatic
solution to this crisis. In January 2012, then-Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta stated publicly that Iran's breakout - the time it would take from
making the decision to build the bomb to having the material for a bomb -
was 12 months. In spite of massive sanctions on Iran aimed at both retarding
the nuclear program and convincing the Iranians that the nuclear program was
too costly to continue, the Iranians aggressively expanded their nuclear
activities.
By January 2013, exactly a year later, a new sense of urgency dawned on the
White House. Iran's breakout time had shrunk from 12 months to a mere 8-12
weeks. If Iran decided to dash for a bomb, the United States might not have
enough time to stop Tehran militarily.
According to former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, Iran's shrinking
breakout time caused the U.S. to be "closer to war with the Islamic Republic
than at any time since 1979." Other countries realized the danger as well.
"The actual threat of military action was almost felt as electricity in the
air before a thunderstorm," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov
told me.
If nothing changed, President Obama concluded, the U.S. would soon face a
binary option: Either go to war with Iran (due to pressure from Israel,
Saudi Arabia and some elements inside the U.S.) to stop its nuclear program
or acquiesce to Iran's nuclear fait accompli. The only way out of this
lose-lose situation was a diplomatic solution. Three months later, the U.S.
and Iran held a pivotal secret meeting in Oman where the Obama
administration managed to secure a diplomatic breakthrough that paved the
way for the JCPOA.
The deal prevented war. Killing the deal prevents the peace. If Trump
collapses the deal and the Iranians restart their program, the U.S. will
soon find itself facing the same dilemma that Obama did in 2013. The
difference is that the President is now Donald Trump, a man who doesn't even
know how to spell diplomacy, let alone conduct it.
2. Trump is planning to take on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps
Decertification is only half the story. Trump also plans to significantly
escalate tensions with Iran in the region, including taking a measure that
both the Bush and Obama administrations rejected: Designate the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization. Make no
mistake, the IRGC is far from an army of saints. It is responsible for much
of the repression against the population inside of Iran and it fought the
U.S. military indirectly in Iraq through Shia militias. But it has also been
one of the most critical fighting forces against ISIS.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to a joint session of the
U.S. Congress on March 3, 2015, in opposition to President Barack Obama's
nuclear agreement with Iran. (Screen shot from CNN broadcast)
In real terms, the designation does not add much to the pressure the U.S.
already is or can impose on the IRGC. But it ratchets things up in a very
dangerous way without any clear benefits to the United States. The
drawbacks, however, are crystal clear.
IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari issued a stern warning last week: "If the
news is correct about the stupidity of the American government in
considering the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist group, then the
Revolutionary Guards will consider the American army to be like Islamic
State [ISIS] all around the world." If the IRGC acts on its warning and
targets U.S. troops - and there are 10,000 such targets in Iraq - we will
only be a few steps away from war.
3. Trump is escalating without having any exit-ramps
Escalation is under all circumstances a dangerous game. But it is
particularly dangerous when you do not have diplomatic channels that ensure
that the other side reads your signals correctly and that provide mechanisms
for de-escalation. Not having such exit-ramps is like driving a car without
a brake. You can accelerate, you can crash, but you can't brake.
Military commanders understand this. That's what former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen warned about prior to the Obama
administration investing in diplomacy. "We've not had a direct link of
communication with Iran since 1979," Mullen said. "And I think that has
planted many seeds for miscalculation. When you miscalculate, you can
escalate and misunderstand. We are not talking to Iran, so we don't
understand each other. If something happens, it's virtually assured that we
won't get it right - that there will be miscalculation which would be
extremely dangerous in that part of the world."
Mullen issued this warning when Obama was president, a man often criticized
for being too restrained and too unwilling to use military power. Imagine
how nervous and worried Mullen must be today with Trump calling the shots in
the situation room.
4. Some U.S. allies want the U.S. to fight their war with Iran
There is no secret that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been pushing
the U.S. for years to go to war with Iran. Israel in particular was not only
making threats of preemptive military action itself, its ultimate aim was to
convince the United States to conduct the attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities for Israel.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking to the AIPAC
conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)
"The intention," former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak admitted to the
Israeli paper Ynet in July of this year, "was both to make the Americans
increase sanctions and to carry out the operation."
While the Israeli security establishment today opposes killing the nuclear
deal (Barak himself said as much in an interview with the New York Times
this week), there are no indications that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has changed his mind on this matter. He has called on Trump to
"fix or nix" the deal, though his criteria for how to fix the deal is so
unrealistic it virtually ensures the deal will collapse - which in turn
would put the U.S. on a path to war with Iran.
The only person who arguably has a worse sense of judgment than Trump is
Netanyahu. After all, this is what he told U.S. lawmakers in 2002 as he
lobbied them to invade Iraq: "If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I
guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the
region."
5.Trump's donors are obsessed with starting war with Iran
Some have suggested that Trump is pursuing the decertification of the Iran
deal - in spite of the near consensus advice of his top advisors to not go
down this path - as a result of pressure from his base. But there is no
evidence that his base cares much about this issue.
Rather, as Eli Clifton meticulously had documented, the most dedicated force
behind Trump's obsession with killing the Iran deal is not his base, but a
tiny group of top Republican donors. "A small number of his biggest campaign
and legal defense donors have made extreme comments about Iran and, in at
least one case, advocated for the use of a nuclear weapon against the
Islamic Republic," Clifton wrote last month.
The billionaire Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, has given
Trump $101,700 to help pay Trump and Donald Trump Jr.'s legal fees following
the probe into Russian election interference. Hedge-fund billionaire Paul
Singer is another major donor to pro-war groups in Washington who Trump has
relied upon for financial support. The most famous billionaire donor, of
course, is Sheldon Adelson who has contributed $35 million to pro-Trump
Super PAC Future 45. All of these donors have pushed for war with Iran,
though only Adelson has gone as far as to suggest the U.S. should strike
Iran with nuclear weapons as a negotiating tactic.
Thus far, Trump has gone with the advice of these billionaires on Iran over
that of his Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and Chairman of Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
None of the above five scenarios were realistic a few months ago. They have
become plausible - even likely - because Trump has decided to make them so.
Just like with George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, Trump's confrontation with
Iran is a war of choice, not a war of necessity.
Trita Parsi is President of the National Iranian American Council and author
of Losing an Enemy - Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. [This article
first appeared at
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-reasons-why-trump-is-moving-towards-w
ar-with-iran_us_59df6f8de4b0fdad73b27711?
