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.
By threatening Iran with war, Donald Trump is proving to be the “perfect little puppet,” as he once put it of his largest donor, Sheldon Adelson, who is close to Netanyahu and once called on Obama to nuke Iran. Too bad the media can’t talk about it.
As a US carrier steams toward Iran, Trump risks another disastrous neoconservative war in the Middle East. The pundits and pols who supported the Iraq war, from Joe Biden to Jeffrey Goldberg to Roger Cohen, still have not accounted for that tragic error; and they could clear their account nobly today by coming out against any war with Iran based on sad experience.