President Biden’s commitment to re-entering the Iran nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA—is already facing backlash from a motley crew of warhawks both domestic and foreign. Right now, opponents of re-entering the deal are centering their vitriol on one of the nation’s foremost experts on both the Middle East and diplomacy: Robert Malley, who Biden might tap to be the next Iran envoy.
The neocons were a conspiracy in plain sight who fomented the Iraq war, says star academic Heather Cox Richardson, dismissing “tin foil hat” theorizing. Though even her questioning about the causes of the war stops short of the role of Israel in neoconservative thought.
Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen, two Republican neoconservatives, endorse Joe Biden saying he will foster bipartisan support for Israel. And don’t worry about the Iran deal. Biden can’t easily return to the deal, Edelman assures a “Jews for Biden” event, because Trump has now set the terms and Dem leaders including Schumer and Menendez don’t like the deal.
Robert Draper’s ‘To Start A War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq’ is a stunning, thorough account that is not only historically indispensable, but is also an up-to-date warning that the U.S. could be tricked into a war with Iran, with some of the same culprits responsible.
“We don’t have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel,” Trump tells a rally in North Carolina. And the comments have gone all but unreported in the mainstream press.
On May 15, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL reported a Jewish site in Iran was “set afire overnight.” The report was widely picked up, but looks very doubtful. Iranian media say an attack on the site was unsuccessful. Greenblatt has revealed himself as another ideologue in the campaign for regime change in Iran.
Trump has made the establishment nostalgic for the last Republican president. But Bush made the most destructive executive mistake of recent times, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It was based on lies, and a weakminded strategy of bringing democracy by gunpoint, and its wrongness was obvious at the time to millions who protested it.
The late foreign policy guru Les Gelb tried to rationalize his decision to support the Iraq war by chalking it up to “unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”
The media can’t talk about Sheldon Adelson when discussing the US confrontation with Iran over nukes, though he’s only Trump’s biggest donor, and John Bolton’s protector, and he was at White House officials’ side when they took part in a settlers’ bash in occupied Jerusalem.
Neither the US political establishment nor the people want a war with Iran, and Donald Trump knows it’s a political disaster. But 9 years ago Obama was seen as untrustworthy on Iran, and the lead reporter on the Middle East Jeffrey Goldberg goaded him to attack Iran with a report that Israel was going to attack Iran, a report that proved false.