{"id":9736,"date":"2019-05-11T10:47:20","date_gmt":"2019-05-11T06:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/?p=9736"},"modified":"2021-01-21T19:27:34","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T15:57:34","slug":"john-bolton-has-his-own-proxy-force-in-mek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/posts\/9736","title":{"rendered":"John Bolton has his own proxy force in MEK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump Is Getting Dangerously Close to War With Iran<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The administration has drawn a dubious red line that could be easily crossed.
\nThe United States is hurtling toward a conflict with Iran, and it\u2019s not clear that President Donald Trump has an exit strategy.
\nIn the year since he dumped the Obama administration\u2019s prized nuclear agreement, Trump has pursued a policy of \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d toward Iran with a series of increasingly bellicose moves. Last month, he designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite military group with vast economic influence in the region, a foreign terrorist organization. Weeks later, he bannedthe purchase of Iranian oil, in a blow to eight countries\u2014including allies like Japan and South Korea\u2014that had previously relied on US waivers to accept it.
\nThose actions were just a prelude to this week, during which Trump sanctioned another key Iranian export, industrial metals, and deployed an aircraft carrier to the Middle East two weeks earlier than planned in response to intelligence that Iran was targeting US troops in Syria and Iraq. \u201cThe United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime,\u201d national security adviser John Bolton said in a statement announcing the move, \u201cbut we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.\u201d
\nThe statement hinted at \u201ca number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings\u201d from Tehran, but the nature of this intelligence remains unclear. The Daily Beast reported Tuesday that \u201cthe administration blew it out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.\u201d Israel, purportedly the source of the intelligence, acknowledged as much to Axios. \u201cIt is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it,\u201d an Israeli official told the outlet.
\nMore concerning is the role played in all of this by Bolton, who earned a reputation in the George W. Bush administration for exaggerating global threats by cherry-picking intelligence. Interagency meetings, which used to be a regular feature of the National Security Council, have all but disappeared during his tenure. The lack of a permanent secretary of defense\u2014and the presence of an acting one with zero foreign policy experience\u2014have increased the influence of Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both of whom have expressed strong anti-Iran sentiments. (On Thursday, Trump announced his intention to nominate Patrick Shanahan, the acting Defense secretary, for the permanent job.)<\/p>\n

Bolton once argued for a preemptive military strike to wipe out Iran\u2019s nuclear program and received $40,000 in 2016 to speak before the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a radical anti-regime organization formerly designated as a terrorist group by the United States. \u201cThe regime in Tehran needs to be overthrown at the earliest opportunity!\u201d he told attendees at one MEK event, according to The New Yorker. Pompeo considers Iran \u201cthe world\u2019s largest state sponsor of terrorism\u201d and has made the questionable claim that the regime, which espouses a brutal form of Shiite Islam, has ties to al-Qaeda, the Sunni terrorist group that despises Iran.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pompeo and Bolton see Iran\u2019s fingerprints everywhere. That\u2019s why the red line laid out in Bolton\u2019s statement is so frightening to national security experts familiar with these men\u2019s views. \u201cThe fact that those actions take place, if they do, by some third-party proxy, whether that\u2019s a Shia militia group or the Houthis or Hezbollah, we will hold the Iranians\u2014Iranian leadership\u2014directly accountable for that,\u201d Pompeo told reporters while traveling to Finland this week. The groups he identified often come into conflict with Saudi Arabia and Israel, the United States\u2019 two strongest allies in the region. Whether their encounters qualify as a proxy attack on American interests is for presumably Trump and his advisers to decide.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re closer to war with Iran now than we\u2019ve been at any time since the summer of 2010,\u201d says Joe Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. \u201cAny spark in the region could set off this fire.\u201d
\nOn Wednesday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced the country\u2019s partial withdrawal from the nuclear deal unless its signatories arrived at a new compromise within 60 days. The move left Europe in an awkward position, stuck between letting the 2015 agreement collapse and incurring the wrath of Trump\u2019s sanctions.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t think that the pressure is designed to bring the US to the negotiating table,\u201d says Emma Ashford, who studies the Middle East and international security at the libertarian Cato Institute. \u201cIt\u2019s designed to work around the US in a situation where the Iranian leadership doesn\u2019t perceive any ability of working with the US.\u201d
\nIf Trump\u2019s evolution on North Korea is any clue, he is not averse to abandoning \u201cfire and fury\u201d in pursuit of a breakthrough with a hostile regime. Once dictator Kim Jong Un agreed to meet with him last year in Singapore, Trump went from mocking him as \u201cLittle Rocket Man\u201d to praising him as \u201cvery talented.\u201d He\u2019s laid the groundwork for a similar about-face with Rouhani. After threatening his Iranian counterpart with consequences \u201cTHE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE\u201d on Twitter, Trump invited him to meet eight times\u2014Rouhani says he rejected every invitation\u2014and called him, in another tweet, \u201can absolutely lovely man.\u201d
\nThe flexibility Trump so prizes in his negotiating style was missing in Hanoi, when the second Kim-Trump confab failed after the United States refused to grant partial sanctions relief in return for incremental action from North Korea. It would presumably be missing in any conversation with Iran, too. The moderate, incremental option went out the window when Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal. The foundation of Trump\u2019s rejection of that deal was the belief it didn\u2019t go far enough.
\nBrian Hook, the US special representative to Iran, hinted at the Americans\u2019 intransigent position during his remarks on Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a defense think tank in Washington, DC. He wouldn\u2019t say whether there were any preconditions to talks with Tehran, but hanging over any future negotiation would inevitably be the 12 requirements Pompeo outlined last year as a framework for another American deal with Iran. No reasonable observer expects Iran to accede to all these demands, but Hook left no moderate options on the table. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to give Iran veto power over our national security,\u201d he said.
\nThat\u2019s a noble goal, but any deal is incumbent on Iranian involvement, and it\u2019s not clear how Iran could expect its American interlocutors to be negotiating in good faith. \u201cThey want Iran to be like Japan at the end of World War II,\u201d Cirincione says. \u201cIt\u2019s the codification of regime change.\u201d Pompeo privately denies this. In a closed-door meeting last month with Iranian-American leaders, he reportedly said the United States is \u201cnot going to do a military exercise inside Iran\u201d to spur regime change, according to Axios. Bolton has struck a far harsher tone. In February, he filmed a menacing video on Twitter to mark the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. \u201cFor all your boasts, for all your threats to the life of the American president, you are responsible for terrorizing your own people,\u201d he told Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. \u201cI don\u2019t think you\u2019ll have many more anniversaries to enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan Spinelli, Mother Jones,<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bolton once argued for a preemptive military strike to wipe out Iran\u2019s nuclear program and received $40,000 in 2016 to speak before the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a radical anti-regime organization formerly designated as a terrorist group by the United States. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[85,90,642,178,20],"module":[81],"ctype":[17],"blog":[651],"class_list":["post-9736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mujahedin-khalq-proxy-force","tag-mujahedin-khalq-terrorism","tag-mujahedin-warmongers","tag-paid-advocacy-for-mko","tag-pmoi-iran-people","tag-third-view-mek","module-article","ctype-story","blog-mother-jones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9736"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=9736"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=9736"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=9736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}