Mullen issued this warning when Obama was president, a man often criticized for being too restrained and too unwilling to use military power. Imagine how nervous and worried Mullen must be today with Trump calling the shots in the situation room.
- Some U.S. allies want the U.S. to fight their war with Iran
There is no secret that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been pushing the U.S. for years to go to war with Iran. Israel in particular was not only making threats of preemptive military action itself, its ultimate aim was to convince the United States to conduct the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities for Israel.
"The intention, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak admitted to the Israeli paper Ynet in July of this year, "was both to make the Americans increase sanctions and to carry out the operation."
While the Israeli security establishment today opposes killing the nuclear deal (Barack himself said as much in an interview with the New York Times this week), there are no indications that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has changed his mind on this matter. He has called on Trump to "fix or nix" the deal, though his criteria for how to fix the deal is so unrealistic it virtually ensures the deal will collapse -- which in turn would put the U.S. on a path to war with Iran.
The only person who arguably has a worse sense of judgment than Trump is Netanyahu. After all, this is what he told U.S. lawmakers in 2002 as he lobbied them to invade Iraq: "If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region."
- Trump's donors are obsessed with starting war with Iran
Some have suggested that Trump is pursuing the decertification of the Iran deal -- in spite of the near consensus advice of his top advisers to not go down this path -- as a result of pressure from his base. But there is no evidence that his base cares much about this issue.
Rather, as Eli Clifton meticulously had documented, the most dedicated force behind Trump's obsession with killing the Iran deal is not his base, but a tiny group of top Republican donors. "A small number of his biggest campaign and legal defense donors have made extreme comments about Iran and, in at least one case, advocated for the use of a nuclear weapon against the Islamic Republic," Clifton wrote last month.
The billionaire Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, has given Trump $101,700 to help pay Trump and Donald Trump Jr.'s legal fees following the probe into Russian election interference. Hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer is another major donor to pro-war groups in Washington who Trump has relied upon for financial support. The most famous billionaire donor, of course, is Sheldon Adelson who has contributed $35 million to pro-Trump Super PAC Future 45. All of these donors have pushed for war with Iran, though only Adelson has gone as far as to suggest the U.S. should strike Iran with nuclear weapons as a negotiating tactic.
Thus far, Trump has gone with the advice of these billionaires on Iran over that of his Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff.
None of the above five scenarios were realistic a few months ago. They have become plausible -- even likely -- because Trump has decided to make them so. Just like with George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, Trump's confrontation with Iran is a war of choice, not a war of necessity.
This article first appeared at Huffington Post(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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