Like the recent oil tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman, the Trump administration has framed the drone incident as if it occurred in a vacuum – implying that the Iranians are launching these (alleged) attacks without provocation, and providing an aura of legitimacy to a possible American military response. [...]
The current Iran predicament is the result of a years-long campaign by the same people who pushed for invasion of Iraq. Instead of learning from the Iraq debacle, they’ve decided that any means, including a potentially catastrophic war with Iran, are justified in order to achieve regime change in Tehran. Their public arguments for escalation with Iran have generally been cloaked as criticism of Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement, by disingenuously calling for what they know is an unachievable “better deal”. [...]
But instead of capitalizing on these gains, the Trump administration threw it all away to take a different path. Slowly, over time, Trump officials ramped up their bellicose rhetoric toward Iran; falsely accused Tehran of coordinating with al-Qaida (presumably to invoke the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force as legal justification for a possible attack); pulled out of the JCPOA; and imposed sanctions so devastating that the Iranians were almost certain to lash out, whether in the form of the minor skirmishes we’ve seen in recent weeks or rejection of the terms of the 2015 nuclear accord.
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