The Observer:

Donald Trump was repeatedly warned that his aggressive policy of escalating military and economic “maximum pressure” on Iran risked triggering war by accident. Last week, the long-predicted miscalculations duly occurred and, for a few scary hours, the world tottered on the brink. Both sides in the Gulf made mistakes, although US commanders appear more at fault. But the biggest mistake of all was made in 2016, when Americans picked a dangerous fool for president.

The sequence of events that led Trump to order airstrikes on Thursday evening, then pull back with minutes to spare, began with the shooting down by Iran of an unmanned US surveillance drone. Threats and insults had been flying back and forth for months. In the preceding week, Washington accused Tehran of attacking oil tankers – and sent more troops to squat around its borders. But it was the drone incident that brought matters to a head.

The Pentagon said the drone was flying in international airspace when hit by a missile. Iran hotly denied that, saying its sovereign airspace was being violated. The US produced maps. So, too, did Iran, which was so sure of its case that it vowed to take it to the UN security council. Yet, as the White House struggled to explain why the strikes were called off, questions emerged about its account.

The Pentagon’s images of the drone’s route initially included an incorrect description of its flight path. On Friday, US officials belatedly confirmed Iran’s assertion that a second, manned plane – a US navy P-8A Poseidon – was present during the incident, a fact they had previously failed to mention. Iran, meanwhile, published photographs of wreckage allegedly retrieved from its territorial waters.

In tweets and interviews on Friday, Trump and his backers claimed, variously, that he halted the strikes to save human life, that a local Iranian commander opened fire without authorisation, even that the on-off strikes were a cunning ploy. But a senior administration official, speaking anonymously, seems to have come closer to the truth when he said the strikes were halted due to “concerns” that the drone, or another US drone, or the navy P-8A, had indeed strayed into Iranian airspace “at some point”.

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