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Israel is trying to hook us into a war with Iran– Matthews and Baer speculate

Robert Baer 2
Robert Baer

An important crack in the wall: last night Chris Matthews hosted former spook Robert Baer, now of Time magazine, and NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel and they both said that Israel is escalating hostilities with Iran to provoke Iran into an attack that will justify American military response. As Matthews said, oh, so they’re trying to hook us into a war?

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Baer is the leader of this conversation. He has no doubt that Israel killed the Iranian scientist (and Engel echoes). He has no doubt of the aim: war. Matthews seems to concur, but with a faked puzzlement.  

That is the most curious part of the exchange, to me, Matthews’s practiced innocence. At the end, he says the most important words, we’ll be following this till the election. And in a signal to his bosses, he says, Because it’s politics. It’s not about Israel’s divine right to exist. It’s about the lobby playing out in our politics. I think that Matthews is telling the Comcast boys– David Cohen, who formerly chaired the Jewish federations in Philadelphia, Matthews’s home town– that he has an obligation to cover this stuff because it’s about America going to war and it’s in the political campaign and that doesn’t make him an enemy of Israel (Israel has plenty of enemies around the world, he has already said, here). But to the partial transcript:

Baer: It’s undoubtedly the Israelis, it couldn’t be anyone else. The Israelis as far as I can see are trying to provoke the Iranians into doing something.

Matthews: We are vulnerable over there. We have an American who has just been condemned to death for espionage.

Baer: What we’re seeing is an escalation, Chris, and it’s almost as if the intention is to get the Iranians to fire a missile at an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, which would cause a wider war.

Matthews: Why would that help us?

Baer: It wouldn’t help us, it would help them… because the Israelis would force us into hitting the Iranians, hit them back, and that’s exactly what they want.

Matthews (with virginal voice): Oh so it’s the Israelis forcing us into this….

Engel: Incredibly hard sanctions on Iran [have the country] backed into a corner. If you want to hit Iran and you need a pretext to do that…the way to do that is by forcing your adversary into making some kind of aggressive move and everyone will think you’re correct when you respond by force….

Matthews: This is moving toward creating a pretext for an eventual attack on nuclear facilities?

Baer: Oh absolutely… This is speculation… I know the White House doesn’t want a war with Iran. But we see from all quarters, this pressure, this logic of war that keeps on marching forward… The Iranians [Baer means Israelis] look at it this way. They have a year or two [in which to act]… They can’t be seen to be initiating this. So they keep on assassinating the people in Iran, you will get a reaction out of them that will look stupid… then the rest of the world will say, you know there’s nothing else we could have done, except hit the Israelis [he means Iranians]….

Engel: The Israelis can’t be seen, or it’s very difficult for them to be seen, as drawing first blood… Killing a 32 year old scientist who worked in procurement is not going to stop the program… They’ve so far killed five people…

Matthews: How can the U.S. not see this as adversarial by Israel to try and hook us into a war? If that’s seen to manipulate that into a war we don’t want to get into, how can we not see that as from an ally, hostile? … Bob, you’re saying that Israel is trying to provoke the Iranians into attacking.

Baer: If we’re attacked, it gives Israelis and the Americans, it puts us on the same side to hit the Iranians. They need our Air Force.

Matthews. We’re going to be hearing about this from now to election day. I just read Elliott Abrams in the Wall Street Journal. All the politics are on the table now. It’s all involved in politics and not just the survival of Israel down the road.

Common Dreams notes that Robert Baer, the long-time senior CIA officer who spent 21 years working the Middle East, made the same case to the Guardian:

Baer argues that the impact on the nuclear program itself is likely to be so minimal, it is unlikely to be the aim of the murder campaign.

“It’s a provocation,” he says. “My theory is that Israel couldn’t get the White House to agree to bombing. It is not satisfied with sanctions, so the Israelis are trying to provoke the Iranians into launching a missile and starting a war.”

Robert Baer
Robert Baer
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Robert Baer 2
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Thank you Phil.
Baer: “It wouldn’t help us, it would help them… because the Israelis would force us into hitting the Iranians, hit them back, and that’s exactly what they want.” This really ties in with the need for Israel and America’s Israel-firsters to artificially generate a “Pearl Harbor” scenario, as in the Patrick Clawson/ WINEP link you posted yesterday. Sick and Machiavellian!

I sometimes wonder where Phil is coming from with this stuff…..

The rational response to the Israeli’s doing this (trying to rope the US into war, and fight on their behalf) would be – tell Tel Aviv they risk US military retaliation on Israel. But I can’t think that Weiss would want “his people” threatened like that, would he?

If someone has an idea for how to deal with Israel as it is, other than an explicit threat to use force, please let me know….

To Dan’s comment, I disagree that the rational response to Israel’s warmongering is to threaten Israel with “military retaliation”. Obviously there are many more appropriate diplomatic steps to take to show the Israelis how dangerous their behavior is to the US. For instance, suspending all foreign/military aid to Israel until they start behaving responsibly, or support Palestinian statehood at the UN.

This is a minor detail, but rest assured, it does figure into Tel-Aviv’s political calculations. The murder comes mere days after the United States rescued the crew of an Iranian fishing vessel, an act for which Iran was thankful and characterized as a humanitarian gesture.

For Israel, any member of a nation that is considered to be an enemy is fair game. One sees that in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel where anyone traveling is considered a security threat by virtue of his/her ethnicity, one can see that in the Israeli navy’s treatment of Gaza’s fishermen and in the treatment to which Palestinians are subjected when they seek medical services and are pressured to work as informants for the Shabak.

When the US rescued those Iranian fishermen, Israel saw that as the last straw. Those Americans are not serious about this anti-Iran business. We need to show them what expectations WE have. And so the assassination was green-lighted.

Thanks Phil for being on top of this issue, and more importantly to me thanks for taking the stance that you are an American first and foremost, this seems to be the stumblingblock for many of your fellow lansmen.

can you say alleluyah amen cause the christian zionists will be the last bastion of support for the neocons.