Cartoon by Michael Ramirez

Bolton Keeps Trying to Goad Iran Into War

The Atlantic: The conventions of mainstream journalism make it difficult to challenge America’s self-conception as a peace-loving nation. But the unlovely truth is this: Throughout its history, America has attacked countries that did not threaten it. To carry out such wars, American leaders have contrived pretexts to justify American aggression. That’s what the Trump administration—and especially its national security adviser, John Bolton—is doing now with Iran.

The historical examples abound. William McKinley’s administration sought a pretext for war in 1898, when—driven by the desire to evict Spain from its colonies in the Caribbean—it ignored evidence that an internal explosion, not a Spanish attack, had blown up the U.S.S. Maine in Havana’s harbor. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson exaggerated a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin to win congressional approval to escalate the Vietnam War. In 1986, the Reagan administration sent warplanes toward Libya’s coast to provoke the missile fire that would justify an American bombing campaign. In 1997, according to the memoir of General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a top Clinton administration official suggested that he lure Saddam Hussein into shooting down a U-2 spy plane over Iraq so the U.S. would have the “precipitous event” it needed “to go in and take out Saddam.” (Shelton refused). In their book, Hubris, David Corn and Michael Isikoff recount a 2002 CIA plan to help Iraqi exiles take over an Iraqi air base and thus, in the words of one of plan’s authors, “create an incident in which Saddam lashes out” so “you’d have a premise for war.”

Bolton is doing something similar today. For more than a decade, he’s consistently promoted war with Iran. All that has changed are the pretexts he offers to justify one.

In January 2007, President George W. Bush accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps of “providing material support for attacks on American troops” in Iraq and launched a series of raids in which American soldiers detained Iranian officials there. U.S. and British intelligence analysts cast doubt on the claims of top Bush officials that Iran was a major driver of the Iraqi insurgency. Nonetheless, in internal administration discussions that summer, Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly urged airstrikes against alleged insurgent training camps in Iran. And Bolton, who had left the Bush administration the previous year, publicly endorsed the idea. He argued on Fox News that the U.S. “is fully entitled to take defensive measures, which could include going after the Revolutionary Guards inside Iran.”

But Bolton was just getting started. In 2008 he offered another rationale for striking Iran: That in addition to supporting anti-American forces in Iraq, “they’re doing much the same by aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan.” Over the next few years, as American soldiers left Iraq, Bolton’s initial rationale faded. But his desire for war did not. Between 2012 and 2015 he repeatedly called for bombing Iran to stop its nuclear program.

Since becoming Trump’s national security adviser, Bolton has continued this pattern. Along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he’s offered justification after justification for attacking Iran. When one hasn’t worked, he’s found another.

Last September, a militia linked to Iran allegedly launched three mortars into an open lot near the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, hurting no one. According to The New York Times, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis dismissed the attack as “insignificant.” But Bolton demanded that the military draw up plans for retaliation. “People were shocked,” one former administration official told The Wall Street Journal. “It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”

Mattis averted an American strike. But he couldn’t stop Bolton from giving a speech that same month that all but advertised his desire for war. Addressing Iran’s leaders, Bolton announced, “If you cross us, our allies or our partners, if you harm our citizens, if you continue to lie, cheat and deceive, yes, there will indeed be hell to pay…We are watching and we will come after you.”

In November, according to the New Yorker, Bolton found another pretext for military action. Iran was preparing to test-fire a medium-range ballistic missile, and Bolton suggested shooting it down. Again, he was overruled.

Then this January, Iran launched a satellite into space. “This is in defiance of UNSCR 2231,” Pompeo tweeted. “We won’t stand by while the regime threatens international security.” The New York Times noted that, “the Pentagon and intelligence agencies disagreed with Mr. Pompeo’s interpretation of the threat posed by the satellite launches,” which Iran had been conducting since 2005. Yet again, security officials reined Pompeo and Bolton in. But inside the military, alarm was spreading. “Senior Pentagon officials are voicing deepening fears,” reported another Times piece that month, “that President Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John R. Bolton, could precipitate a conflict with Iran.”

The fears were well placed. In April, Pompeo told Congress that “there is no doubt there is a connection” between Al Qaeda and Iran--which raised the prospect that the Trump administration would not request new congressional authorization for war with Tehran. It would simply invoke the authorization against Al Qaeda that Congress passed three days after 9/11.

That same month, Bolton and Pompeo pushed through a decision to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, overriding the objection of General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military officials, who warned, according to the Times, that the move “could incite retaliation by Tehran against American troops and intelligence officers.”

Still, Bolton and his fellow hawks turned up the pressure even further. In April, the Trump administration announced that the U.S.—having already reimposed sanctions on Iran after withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal—was eliminating the waivers that permitted China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey to buy Iranian oil. The goal, in Pompeo’s words, was to drive Tehran’s oil exports—which provide roughly 40 percent of its government revenue—to “zero.” In May, the administration added sanctions on Iranian steel, aluminum, iron, and copper, which comprise 10 percent of the country’s exports >>>

Peter Beinart is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York.