5
Reasons Why Trump Is Moving Towards War With
Iran
Trump’s confrontation with Iran is a war of
choice, not a war of necessity.
By Trita Parsi
October
12, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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Make no mistake: We
do not have a crisis over the Iran nuclear deal.
It is working and everyone from Secretary Mattis
and Tillerson to the US and Israeli intelligence
services to the International Atomic Energy
Agency agree:
Iran is adhering to the deal.
But 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 does the restrictions on Iran’s
nuclear program
The
nuclear deal, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) took two very bad scenarios of
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
twelve 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 twelve 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 US) 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 US 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 US 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.
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.
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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
provides 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 US allies want the US
to fight their war with Iran
There is no secret
that Israel,
Saudi Arabia
and the
UAE have been
pushing the US 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.
“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
US on a path to war with Iran.
The
only person who arguably has a worse sense of
judgement than Trump is Netanyahu. After all,
this is
what he told US 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
US 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 Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Trump’s
confrontation with Iran is a war of choice, not
a war of necessity.
Trita
Parsi, President, National Iranian American
Council
This
article was originally published by
Huffinton
Post
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