Since Donald Trump decided not to attack Iran Thursday, it has been stated again and again that the American people don’t want another war in the Middle East. NPR says so, PBS says so, the Washington Post says the Congress is “war-weary,” the Times notes the considerable support Trump has gotten from Republicans; and even Lindsey Graham has backed Trump’s decision. So do Democratic liberals and centrists and Nancy Pelosi.

Trump himself said a war with Iran is unpopular when he told his Orlando rally Thursday that great nations don’t fight “endless wars,” and he was removing troops and putting “America first.”

The reasonable question here is, Who wants a war with Iran, and why do they want it? (...)

The July 3, 1988 Vincennes incident is also instructive because it vividly displayed of how things can go horribly wrong really quick and how the U.S. government will brazenly lie to evade liability for its criminal misconduct.

With the U.S. playing a ‘Top Cop’ role in the Persian Gulf – today as in the 1980s ostensibly to contain Iran – it’s interesting that the U.S. Navy’s defense of that indefensible 1988 airliner shootdown contained components of excuses utter persistently by American police in instances of fatal shootings of unarmed civilians.

In the cases of those murdered by American cops, the offending officer immediately declares he or she fired because they feared for their life. The captain of the Vincennes declared he ordered the airliner to be shot down because he feared for his life…the life of his ship and crew allegedly endangered by an unarmed civilian airliner.

Like the standard cop defense of supposedly seeing a gun in the hand of the unarmed suspect, Vincennes Captain Will Rogers claimed he saw a jet fighter descending in fast attack approach not a widebody airliner ascending after taking off from an airport.

Like the physical evidence in too many cop shootings that contradict cop claims, data from the sophisticated combat control computer system onboard the Vincennes contradicted the contentions of its captain. Top Navy and Reagan Administration officials later accepted that captain’s claims as valid.

Another parallel between cop shootings and the airliner shootdown is the blame-the-victim reflex.

The Vincennes captain, Navy brass, top Reagan Administration officials (along with much of the American mainstream news media) blamed Iran for allowing its airliner to fly outside the corridor for commercial airliners, allowing that airliner to operate without using identification signals for civilian airplanes and allowing the airliner to fly over a skirmish where lightly armed Iranian military motorboats were allegedly harassing the Vincennes, a heavily armed cruiser larger in size than any U.S. naval vessel except an aircraft carrier.

The targets of the tweets included think-tank analysts, human rights activists and journalists (including me). The common thread is that we are all perceived by regime change proponents and supporters of the Trump administration’s so-called maximum pressure policy to be soft on Iran because we are critical of crushing economic sanctions and the threat of the use of military force against it.

For these thought crimes, we are branded by @IranDisinfo and similar social media accounts as Tehran’s “mouthpieces,” “apologists,” “collaborators,” and “lobbyists” in the West.

I won’t speak for others who have been attacked, and my own views are irrelevant to this situation. From what I can see, though, we all appear to share the view that Iran should be secular and democratic. The main difference between us and those spreading these falsehoods against us is how we envision that change in Iranian politics coming about.

 
Yea but this one is different if we actually do something foolish like Afghanistan and Iraq.  Iran is a whole other level with all of the implications.  Or as Fred Sanford says...."This is the big one, Elizabeth."

Bolton is just awful.  Of all of Trump's transgressions, appointing this bozo is by far his worse.

But now that Trump this week officially reimposed the first series of sanctions that were lifted as part of the agreement, Dubowitz, his FDD colleagues, and other Iran hawks could hardly contain their glee at the renewed opportunity for regime change and/or war.

FDD's Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations climbed to the top of the heap with a 5,000+ word missive in Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard calling for a CIA-assisted regime change effort in Iran.  Depending on what the mullahs do, they write, war may once more be on the horizon.

Aside from the enormous complexities of pulling off such a regime change and the extremely dangerous consequences that would result (none of which the authors address suggesting that the CIA launch another coup in Iran takes some real gall). After all, the CIA's past involvement in fomenting a coup in Iran (or anywhere else for that matter) didn't turn out so well for anyone.

Gerecht and Takeyh try to weasel their way out of this quandary by claiming that the CIA didn't really have all that much to do with the coup in Iran in the 1950s. So, they argue, Americans should just get over their "coup allergy" because "it inhibits creativity." (The CIA itself has admitted that it was behind the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected prime minister. Gerecht and Takeyh acknowledge that the CIA launched the coup but claim that the agency called it off. That is also false.)

As had been previously reported, the European Commission on Friday enacted their “blocking statute,” which would forbid EU-based companies from complying with US sanctions against Iran. The statute also means EU courts will not recognize international claims related to those sanctions.

The commission aims to set the statute back into effect, but it won’t be formally done until at least 60 days from now. The US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal has a 90-day wind-down period, so theoretically there should be nothing to block until early August at any rate.

EU officials have been negotiating the matter all week, as an attempt to try to save the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran after the US withdrew, and started reimplementing sanctions. EU leaders have agreed that the entire union will work together in protecting the deal.

Two major EU companies, Germany’s Siemens and France’s Total S.A. had previously indicated they’d stop Iran deals for fear of punishment from the US. With the law passed, they now have considerable protection, and would be violating EU law in refusing to do business over US sanction threats.

The US hasn’t yet responded to the move, but officials have indicated they are willing to directly target EU companies who keep trading with Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he expects EU nations to back the US in killing the deal.

(...) If these warnings are to be believed, Iran is only a few years away from unveiling a nuclear bomb...and has been for the past three decades. Fittingly, let's begin in 1984.

An April 24, 1984 article entitled "'Ayatollah' Bomb in Production for Iran" in United Press International referenced a Jane's Intelligence Defense Weekly report warning that Iran was moving "very quickly" towards a nuclear weapon and could have one as early as 1986.

In response, a U.S. Department of State spokesman was reportedly quick to point out the official government belief that "it would take at least two to three years to complete construction of the reactors at Bushehr," adding that the light water power reactors at the Bushehr plant "are not particularly well-suited for a weapons program." He also noted that "we have no evidence of Iranian construction of other facilities that would be necessary to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel."

Two months later, on June 27, 1984, in an article entitled "Senator says Iran, Iraq seek N-Bomb," Minority Whip of the U.S. Senate Alan Cranston was quoted as claiming Iran was a mere seven years away from being able to build its own nuclear weapon.

In April 1987, the Washington Post published an article with the title "Atomic Ayatollahs: Just What the Mideast Needs – an Iranian Bomb," in which reporter David Segal wrote of the imminent threat of such a weapon.

The next year, in 1988, Iraq issued warnings that Tehran was at the nuclear threshold. (...) (...) (...)

A passage from a recently declassified document on the 1953 coup in Iran alleges that senior Iranian clerics received “large sums of money” from U.S. officials in the days leading up to the August 19, 1953, overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. The document is apparently British but was located by researchers in files at the U.S. National Archives. It is posted in full today for the first time by the nongovernmental National Security Archive, based at The George Washington University.

The September 2, 1953, British memorandum titled “Persia: Political Review of the Recent Crisis” first appeared in partially declassified form in 1989 in a volume of the State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. However, that volume excised two key passages for security reasons. Tulane scholar Mark Gasiorowski and BBC correspondent Kambiz Fattahi each independently discovered the unexpurgated version at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. (Both versions are available here for comparison.)

The exact role of the clergy in Mosaddeq’s ouster is one of the main unanswered questions still surrounding the decades-old coup. Previous accounts by American intelligence operatives and scholarly reconstructions have shown that the CIA planned to provide certain influential mullahs with funds to help organize street demonstrations, but it has never been known whether those payments reached their intended recipients – and if they did, whether the recipients knew the source. 

In general, eliciting facts and even reliable sourcing on the 1953 coup is notoriously difficult. The surviving record is far from complete, much of it having been destroyed; and in any case, contemporaneous reporting was spotty and frequently unreliable. This makes it a huge challenge to judge the accuracy of what is still available. In the case of the British memo posted today, even the State Department knows very little about it. A footnote in the FRUS volume reports there is no information about its source or how it reached the department. The most the FRUS editors could say was that it “resembles” a Foreign Office or British Embassy record.

From appearances, the memo, which may be a draft given the existence of several typographical errors, was probably written for a British government audience, though not one authorized to know the full details of the operation, often referred to by its British codename BOOT or its American codename TPAJAX. The document had Top Secret classification yet it omits any reference to U.K. assistance in planning the coup, which suggests its readers were not cleared for that information. It even avoids directly acknowledging other basic facts, such as the U.S. role in the operation, saying only that “sources” have pointed to Washington’s participation. The memo also does not name most of those sources, opting instead for euphemistic references to “reliable reports,” for example.

In recent years, new interpretations of the coup have called into question the accuracy of various U.S. archival records and first-person accounts, discounting the importance of the CIA and British intelligence role in the operation and casting doubt on any connection between Iranian clerics and the Western powers. The principal aim of the latter contention is to bolster the case that Iranians, including leading mullahs, acted essentially (if not entirely) on their own in bringing about Mosaddeq’s ouster. (...)