An unhinged Trump could still unleash violence against Iran — but the U.S. media downplay the danger

The single chilling sentence is right there in the 8th paragraph of today’s New York Times story about how Donald Trump just fired his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper:

. . . Defense Department officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries in his waning days in office.

That expression —  “initiate operations” —  is a perfect example of Orwellian vagueness; what the paper actually means is that “Commander-in-Chief Trump might order American troops to fire weapons at Iran, and kill Iranian human beings.”

But after that one sentence, the Times completely drops the subject, and rattles on about the personnel changes at the Pentagon that will follow Trump’s firing of Esper, sounding like a sportswriter covering a trade between two baseball teams. Don’t Times readers, especially in America, have the right to more reporting about how their unhinged president may start killing people in their name?

You have to turn to Axios, a newer online publication, to learn more. Barak Ravid, from Israel, reports that Trump’s special envoy on Iran, Elliott Abrams, is in the Mideast, “pushing a plan to slap a long string of new sanctions on Teheran in the 10 weeks left until Joe Biden’s inauguration.” Israeli sources told Ravid that this “flood” of sanctions 

will increase pressure on the Iranians and make it harder for the Biden administration to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. . . 

New York Times reporter David Halbfinger is also in Israel, but he somehow missed the Elliott Abrams visit. He has a report today that appeared after the Axios dispatch, but he apparently didn’t get around to asking his sources about the increased pressure on Iran. He, and the Times generally, continue to miss (or conceal) a central element of the story: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to goad the U.S. into a conflict with Iran for more than a decade. 

Halbfinger also failed to report an ominous statement by Tzachi Hanegbi, a government minister who belongs to Netanyahu’s Likud party, who said that if Biden revives the Iran nuclear deal a war could break out. Hanagbi said,

If Biden stays with that policy, there will, in the end, be a violent confrontation between Israel and Iran.

Aside from that single sentence in today’s Times, neither it nor the Washington Post seem much alarmed at what an angry Trump might do overseas in the next 10 weeks. By contrast, the British Independent, also a respected establishment newspaper, consulted a number of experts, and reported that 

. . . some fear the famously vindictive Mr. Trump and the coterie of opportunists, foreign-influenced operatives, and hard-right ideologues surrounding him will use the interim period before Mr. Biden is sworn into office on January 20 to further pursue their agendas and harmfully impact the world based on suggestions or advice from his entourage.

And what about the impact of those U.S.-imposed sanctions on the Iranian people? The mainstream U.S. press hasn’t reported on that much lately, but Iran’s deputy health minister just announced that the country bought 5 million doses of flu vaccine — but U.S. sanctions are stopping them from being imported. Iran has been hit hard by COVID-19, and, just like in America and elsewhere, fears a “twindemic” as the winter flu season starts.

The U.S./Israel sanctions policy is not just immoral. It is also colossally stupid. Iran and its 82 million people are not going to surrender, or disappear. Plenty of Iranians, quite probably a majority, dislike their theocratic government, but they are not going to watch their family members and neighbors die unnecessarily without eventually fighting back — somehow, somewhere. The Trump/Netanyahu campaign of economic warfare is fomenting conflict for decades to come.