Jacobin Magazine:

Noah Kulwin is a staff writer for Jewish Currents based in New York City. 

These days, it’s hard to shake the feeling that senior officials in the Trump administration are trying to pull off a similar stunt. This week, National Security Adviser and Bush administration veteran John Bolton ordered the Defense Department to draw up a new military plan for sending 120,000 troops to the Middle East “should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons.” Without the pretext for such a move yet in place, Bolton and his fellow warmongers are busy manufacturing facts as necessary.

Regarding the recent sabotage of Emirati oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, “a U.S. official in Washington, without offering any evidence, told the AP that an American military team’s initial assessment indicated Iran or Iranian allies used explosives to blow holes in the ships.” Meanwhile, American military leaders have maintained that US troops in Syria and Iraq remain on “high alert” for an imminent attack from Iranian forces, publicly rebuking a British general who denied the existence of any credible intelligence suggesting such an attack is forthcoming. Washington’s commitment to its own set of facts remains strong: on Wednesday, the State Department said it was ordering a “partial evacuation” of the embassy in Baghdad due to the purported Iranian threat.

Donald Trump himself has expressed some hesitation over engaging in the kind of adventurous regime change policy that defined the Bush years, as indicated by the faltering, half-hearted US-backed coup in Venezuela. Instead, he has opted to entrench and expand Bush and Obama’s “Forever War” — the global campaign of proxy wars and remote strikes against terrorism suspects.

Even as Democrats and some Republicans have begun singing a different tune about the Saudi-made humanitarian crisis in Yemen, which is ostensibly aimed at curtailing Iranian influence, Trump is still backing America’s trusted allies in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Jerusalem. Trump, congressional Republicans, a good chunk of Democrats, and the Beltway network of think tanks and lobbyists funded by and aligned with those three governments continue to insist that their enemies in Tehran must also be ours.

One would think that the Iraq calamity would be cause for some shame, or at least second thoughts. Aside from the humanitarian catastrophe it induced — hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, thousands more Americans killed or injured, and the groundwork for the rise of ISIS laid — we are still living through the domestic political hangover. For the last fourteen years, a majority of Americans polled have consistently said that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s opposition to the war gave him significant advantages over both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Even Donald Trump — notwithstanding that he supported the war at the time and that his administration is stuffed with cartoon villains who either oversaw or supported it — has expressed a general wariness about military invasions on the scale of Iraq in 2003, which helped distinguish him from Clinton in 2016. It’s a politically shrewd position, almost certainly born less of any meaningful ideological commitment than Trump’s generally correct sense that such a war would dampen his popularity.

This helps explain new reports indicating that Trump is “irritated” with Bolton’s aggressiveness on Iran. Then again, this easily might change, given that our fickle and volatile president wins plaudits from the press for being his most “presidential” whenever he is at his most hawkish.

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