All the signals are pointing to a well
prepared scenario by the war mongers in the Trump Administration, in close cooperation with the Israeli Netanyahu
government.
Here are some of the alarm signals:
US unilaterally pulls out of the
multi-national Iran Nuclear Agreement.
Israel heats up its rhetoric against Iran - US Administration launches sanctions against Iran
- US Administrations recently showed a clearly fabricated video, which it labels as showing Iranian military trying to remove an unexploded mine from a burning tanker, which was actually hit by torpedoes.
The
Trump administration
keeps saying that it doesn’t want to go to war with Iran. The problem, however,
is that some top officials continue to make statements that could pave a
dubiously legal and factually challenged pathway to war.
If that’s the intention, a major flare-up between Washington and Tehran
could lead the administration to say it has the right to launch what
would be one of the
nastiest, bloodiest conflicts in modern history — even if it really doesn’t legally have that authorization.
For months, President Donald Trump and some of his top officials have claimed
Iran and al-Qaeda,
the terrorist group that launched the 9/11 terror attacks, are closely
linked.
That’s been a common refrain despite evidence showing their ties
aren’t strong at all. In fact, even
al-Qaeda’s own documents detail the weak connection between the two.
But insisting there’s a nefarious, continual relationship matters greatly. In 2001, Congress passed an
Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF),
allowing the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force
against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned,
authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on
September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”
Which means that if the Trump administration truly
believes Iran and al-Qaeda have been in cahoots before or after 9/11,
then it could claim war with Tehran already is authorized by law.
That chilling possibility was
raised
during a House Armed Services Committee session early Thursday morning
by an unlikely pair: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a top Trump ally, and Rep.
Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a Pentagon official in the Obama administration.
“The notion that the administration has never maintained
that there are elements of the 2001 AUMF that would authorize their
hostilities toward Iran is not consistent with my understanding of what
they said to us,” said
Gaetz. “We were absolutely presented with a formal presentation on how the AUMF might authorize war on Iran,” added
Slotkin right after, although she noted no one said they
would use it to greenlight a fight.
Pompeo even wrote on Twitter that he thinks can bypass Congress to strike Iran, when he wrote: ""In alignment with what Rep. Gaetz said, we were absolutely presented
with a full formal presentation on how the 2001 AUMF might authorize war
on Iran…Pompeo said it with his own words…a relationship between Iran
and al Qaeda.”
A
2018 study by the New America think tank, based on roughly
470,000 declassified files
obtained from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in 2011, showed no
links between Iran and al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. “In none of
these documents did I find references pointing to collaboration between
al-Qaeda and Iran to carry out terrorism,” Nelly Lahoud, the study’s
author, wrote in a
blog post last September.
What
the documents do show is that Tehran was deeply uncomfortable having
al-Qaeda on its soil, and that bin Laden fiercely distrusted Iran.
For example, Iran detained al-Qaeda members — and some in
bin Laden’s family — for abusing the conditions of their stay in the
country. An al-Qaeda operative thought Tehran was keeping some of its
members hostage: “Iranian authorities decided to keep our brothers as a
bargaining chip” after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a document reviewed
in the study read.
It turns out that Iran and al-Qaeda actually have been at odds for a long time.
When Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, he started off his announcement with a striking
statement.
“The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of
terror. It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle
East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah,
Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda,” he said.
It’s an argument the Trump administration continues to push and it is a dangerous statement, which can result in dire consequences for the Middle East, and if Russia and China get involved, could eventually lead to Armageddon.
