Trump Bows
to Neocons, Netanyahu
Rather
than expand U.S. exports to Iran – and create more
American jobs – President
Trump fell in line
behind Israel’s P.M. Netanyahu, decertifying the
Iran-nuclear deal and risking more war, as Gareth
Porter explains at The American Conservative.
By
Gareth Porter
October 22,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- President Donald Trump’s new Iran policy clearly
represents a dangerous rejection of diplomacy in
favor of confrontation. But it’s more than that:
It’s a major shift toward a much closer alignment of
U.S. policy with that of the Israeli government of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Whether
explicitly or not, Trump’s vow to work with Congress
to renegotiate the Iran nuclear agreement, and his
explicit threat to withdraw from the deal if no
renegotiation takes place, appear to be satisfying
the hardline demands Netanyahu has made of
Washington’s policy toward Tehran.
Specifically, Netanyahu has continued to demand that
Trump either withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA) or make far-reaching changes
that he knows are impossible to achieve. In
Netanyahu’s Sept. 19 speech to the United Nations
General Assembly, Netanyahu declared, “Israel’s
policy toward the nuclear deal with Iran is very
simple: Change it or cancel it.” And he made no
secret of what that meant: If Trump doesn’t “cancel”
the deal, he must get
rid of its “sunset
clause” and demand that
Iran end its advanced centrifuges and long-range
missile program, among other fundamentally
unattainable objectives.
Trump’s statement on Oct. 13 managed
to include both of the either/or choices that
Netanyahu had given him. He warned that, if Congress
and America’s European allies do not agree on a plan
to revise the deal, “then the agreement will be
terminated.” He added that the agreement “is under
continuous review,” and our participation “can be
canceled by me, as president at any time.”
One
provision the administration wants Congress to put
into amended legislation would allow sanctions to be
imposed if Iran crosses certain “trigger points,”
which would include not only nuclear issues but the
Israeli demand that Iran stop its long-range missile
program. Ballistic missiles were never included in
the JCPOA negotiations for an obvious reason: Iran
has the same right to develop ballistic missiles as
any other independent state, and it firmly rejected pro
forma demands by the Barack Obama
administration to include the issue in negotiations.
Trump went
a long way towards Netanyahu’s “cancel” option by
refusing last week to certify that Iran was keeping
up its end of the JPCOA. That move signaled his
intention to scrap the central compromise on which
the entire agreement rests.
Although
the Middle East is very different today than during
the George W. Bush administration, some parallels
can be found in comparing Trump’s policy toward the
JCPOA and Bush’s policy toward Iran during the early
phase of its uranium enrichment program.
The
Likud Wing
The
key figures who had primary influence on both
Trump’s and Bush’s Iran policies held views close to
those of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party. The main
conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White
House is Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law,
a primary foreign policy advisor, and a
longtime friend and supporter of
Netanyahu. Kushner’s parents are also long-time
supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied
West Bank.
Another figure to whom the Trump White House has
turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a
key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration.
Although Bolton was not appointed Trump’s Secretary
of State, as he’d hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a
player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship
with Kushner. Politico reports that
Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final
policy statement was released and urged a complete
withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan
for containing Iran.
Bolton spoke with Trump by phone the day before the
speech about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it
would be “terminated” if there weren’t any
renegotiation, according
to Politico.
He was calling Trump from Las Vegas, where he’d been
meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the
third major figure behind Trump’s shift towards
Israeli issues.
Adelson is a Likud supporter who has long been a
close friend of Netanyahu’s and has used his Israeli
tabloid newspaper Israel Hayom to support
Netanyahu’s campaigns.
He was Trump’s main
campaign contributor in
2016, donating $100 million. Adelson’s real
interest has been in supporting Israel’s interests
in Washington —
especially with regard to Iran.
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In a
public appearance in Israel in 2013, when Adelson
was asked about his view on negotiating with Tehran,
he suggested dropping
a nuclear weapon on a desert in Iran and then saying
to the Iranians, “See! The next one is in the middle
of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be
wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and
continue with your nuclear development….”
The
Likud Party policy preferences on Iran dominated the
Bush administration in large part because of the
influence of David Wurmser, a Likudist who was a
Middle East adviser first to Bolton and later to
Vice President Dick Cheney. Wurmser was a co-author,
with Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, of A
Clean Break,
the 1996 paper that advised Netanyahu to carry out
military strikes against Syria and Iran and to
remove the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Wurmser
convinced Cheney that the administration should seek
a pretext for attacking Iran.
But it was
Bolton who worked with Israeli officials to plan a
campaign to convince the world that Iran was
secretly working on nuclear weapons. His goal was to
sell key European nations on a U.N. Security Council
resolution accusing Iran of developing a nuclear
program. Bolton explains in his memoirs that the
assumption of his strategy was that either the
Security Council would strip Iran of its right to
have a nuclear program or the United States would
take unilateral military action.
Ratcheting Tensions
In the
summer of 2004, a large collection of documents
allegedly from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons
research program was suddenly obtained by Germany’s
foreign intelligence agency. Those documents became
the sole alleged evidence that such a program
existed.
But
this writer found
more than one telltale sign of fraud in the papers,
and a former senior German foreign office official
told me on the record in March 2013 that the source
who passed on the documents was a member of the
Mujihadeen e-Khalq (MEK), the armed Iranian
opposition group. The MEK has
allegedly worked with Israel’s Mossad for
some time.
Neither the
Bush administration nor the Trump administration
viewed the alleged danger of nuclear proliferation
by Iran as the priority problem per se; it was
rather an issue to be exploited to weaken the
Islamic regime and ultimately achieve regime change.
Hilary Mann Leverett, the NSC coordinator in the
Persian Gulf from 2001-03, told this writer in a
2013 interview that Wurmser and other Cheney
advisers were convinced that the student protests of
1999 indicated that Iranians were ready to overthrow
the Islamic Republic. In his statement last week,
Trump blamed
Obama for having
lifted nuclear sanctions on Iran “just before what
would have been the total collapse of the Iranian
regime.”
After
Netanyahu became Israeli prime minister in early
2009, his administration worked assiduously for four
years to maneuver the Obama administration into
giving Iran an ultimatum over its enrichment
program. Obama rejected such a proposal, but Bolton
has repeated
his call for the United States to bomb Iran year
after year.
Now the
Trump administration is playing out a new chapter in
the drama of the Likudists and their patrons in
Washington. Their objective is nothing less than
using U.S. power to weaken Iran through military
means if possible and economic sanctions if
necessary. The remarkable thing is that Trump is
cooperating even more eagerly than did Bush.
Gareth Porter is an
independent journalist and winner of the 2012
Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of
numerous books, including Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter
This
article was originally published by
Consortium News
- |