With the ascendancy of lunatic John Bolton to the White House, the Trump administration appears to be drifting closer and closer to a disastrous war with Iran. Trump's Secretary of Defense and one of the few remaining voices of sanity, James Mattis, is increasingly focused on stopping the warmongers and chicken-hawks from embroiling the USA in yet another expensive, fruitless, and endless Middle Eastern war.(Foreign Policy) Mattis’s Last Stand Is Iran
As the U.S. defense secretary drifts further from President Donald Trump’s inner circle, his mission gets clearer: preventing war with Tehran.
BY MARK PERRY | JUNE 28, 2018, 7:00 AM
Testifying before a Senate subcommittee in early May, Defense Secretary James Mattis reassured his questioners that the U.S. military was ready for a war with Iran. “We maintain military options because of Iran’s bellicose statements and threats,” he said. “And those plans remain operant.” The testimony, which came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would leave the Iran nuclear deal, was classic Mattis: matter-of-fact and confident — but cagey. After all, being ready for a war is not the same thing as actually wanting one — and, when it comes to fighting Iran, it’s clear that an increasing number of senior U.S. military leaders, including Mattis himself, don’t.
The Trump administration’s civilian officials, who increasingly have the president’s ear, are another matter. Most prominently, the administration’s new national security advisor, John Bolton, has long argued that the only way to ensure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon is to force regime change on the country — by bombing it. He’s not alone. Since taking on his new job, Bolton has stripped the National Security Council of his predecessor’s more moderate advisors, replacing them with interventionist hard-liners, including Fred Fleitz, an ex-CIA analyst and a former employee at the uber-hawk and anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. Fleitz, who is Bolton’s chief of staff, has long claimed that anything other than the adoption of “the Bolton plan” — scrapping the Iran deal and working for regime change — lacks “moral clarity.”
In fact, Bolton has gone much further, as he did in a 2015 New York Times op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” where he urged the United States. into a military confrontation with Tehran. “The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required,” he wrote. “Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.” Mattis, by contrast, sees things from the perspective of someone responsible for doing the striking.
That’s not to say that Mattis believes Iran’s leadership can somehow be reasoned with. He doesn’t. Like many other Marines, Mattis nurses an anti-Iran grudge that dates from the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which Tehran planned and supported and which cost the lives of 241 Americans. And when, during the Barack Obama years, Mattis was asked to name the three top threats to American security, he gave a short but pointed answer: “Iran, Iran, Iran.” Nor has Mattis dropped his habit of describing Iran as a “malign influence” — a description he uses so commonly that it is identified with him.
But condemning Iran and pushing for a war with it are two different things. Back in 2011, when Mattis served as the head of the U.S. Central Command, he sat silently through a detailed PowerPoint briefing on how the U.S. Navy planned to pummel the Islamic Republic with swarms of carrier-based F/A-18 Hornets, but he dismissed its airy optimism. “I don’t buy it,” he told an aide, then ordered a new assessment. Mattis’s anxiety has increased in the intervening years, senior military officers say, particularly since he’s become secretary of defense — and since the appointment of Bolton, whose arrival at the White House has coincided with his own marginalization in Trump’s national security decision-making.
[...]
When are Americans going to demand an end to this madness? How much of our money must they waste before Americans say enough is enough? It wasn't bad enough that the US government wasted and continues to waste trillions of dollars on the war in Iraq? It wasn't bad enough that the US government destabilized the entire Middle East and unleashed ISIS on to the world? It's surreal.