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Neocon War Criminals Target Iran
Nuclear Deal
Opponents Urge Military Confrontation with Iran
By National Iranian American Council
December 09, 2016
"Information
Clearing House"
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The U.S. should sink Iranian ships, consider targeted
killings of Iranian fighters in Syria, and ratchet up
new non-nuclear sanctions on Iran under the Trump
Administration, according to a panel of lawmakers and
policymakers organized on Capitol Hill yesterday by the
hawkish United Against Nuclear Iran organization.
Outlining Trump’s options going forward, Mark Dubowitz
of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the
U.S. must “restore coercion” and recommended direct
military confrontation, saying that sanctions alone are
not a silver bullet. “The next time a Revolutionary
Guard attack boat harasses the U.S. Navy, we should sink
it, put it in the bottom of the Gulf,” Dubowitz said.
“That would be a good start.” He also noted the
possibility of directly targeting Iran’s Revolutionary
Guard and Hezbollah proxies that are operating in the
Syrian civil war. “Remember, right now Syria is a
target-rich environment if you want to go after the
Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah, and that’s not just a
hypothetical possibility, the Israelis are doing it
today…The Israelis are enforcing their red lines,
they’re using military force against the Iranians. I
think the United States of America could do the same.”
Former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, echoed
Dubowitz’s calls for military action, advising Trump to
“make it explicit with the power he has as
Commander-in-Chief that if they challenge some of our
naval assets, we will fire on them. We’ve got to be that
explicit.” Lieberman is chairman of UANI and formerly an
advisory board member of an AIPAC organization
explicitly established to kill the nuclear deal. In
addition to the UANI panel, he appeared at a Capitol
Hill event this week organized by the Mujahedin-e Khalq
(MEK), a shadowy group formerly designated as a
terrorist organization by the State Department. They
have a long history of using violence and terror both
against their own members as well as when they were
serving as a military force for Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
At the UANI event, Lieberman said the goal of increased
“pressure” on Iran would be to elicit concessions from
Iran by causing them to “begin to wonder about the
survival of the regime.”
Military confrontation was only part of the strategy put
forward at the UANI briefing. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
(R-FL) joined others in calling for an escalation of
sanctions under the Trump administration. She advocated
for expanding non-nuclear related sanctions on Iran –
including those targeting entire sectors of the Iranian
economy – “and perhaps even rolling back or tightening
provisions of the JCPOA.” Dubowitz, meanwhile, called to
“use our ability under the deal, particularly in
non-nuclear sanctions, which the administration itself
has admitted are not inconsistent with the JCPOA, to
begin to address Iran’s malign activities outside the
deal and inside the deal.” Contrary to his assertions,
however, the JCPOA
prohibits the U.S. from re-imposing sanctions lifted
under the nuclear deal under a separate pretext, and the
Obama administration has
threatened to veto legislation that does so in order
to protect the deal.
Ros-Lehtinen, whose former Chief-of-Staff is leading the
Trump Transition Team’s approach to Iran, forecasted “a
flurry of Iran-related activities early in the New Year”
and looked forward to the “opportunity to undo a lot of
the problematic concessions that we have seen over the
last few years,” adding an enthusiastic “I can’t wait!”
The views
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