Unwarranted Hysteria: The Iranian Threat Is Inflated and Regional War Would Be a Disaster, by Danny Sjursen

After Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, there are still people, some in the highest reaches of the US government, who think the US can “take out” Iran and its probable allies, Russia and China, no problem. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

“The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran. The behavior and the objectives of the [Iranian] regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself. And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!”

~ National Security Adviser John Bolton, 2017

America’s president is being advised by unhinged warmongers. Pay attention, folks – war with Iran is what men like Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu want, and, it’s war they might just get; consequences be damned! With President Trump scuttling the Iran nuclear deal and threatening to impose new sanctions – against the advice of every major European ally – war seems like a genuine, if horrifying, possibility.

Here’s a prediction: (though forecasting is always a dangerous game) President Trump will strike some sort of deal with already nuclear North Korea, vie for a Nobel Peace Prize, and then unleash the U.S. and Israeli military on non-nuclear Iran. The results will be catastrophic.

Israel, no doubt, wants war with Iran, and just this past week blasteddozens of Iranian military sites in Syria. If Netanyahu and his far-right cabal in Tel Aviv want a disastrous, destabilizing war, then let them have it. The problem is that Bibi is counting on big brother Donald Trump and the US to back his play and join the fray. But that war, an American-Iranian conflagration, is not inevitable and ill-advised. The president, a man who ran on a platform of no new “dumb wars” – like the Iraq invasion – and ought to stick to his campaign pledge.

Here’s the bottom line: 1) Iran is neither the threat nor the monster it is billed as; and 2) The actual conduct and results of a major war with the Islamic Republic would be disastrous.

Let’s start with the purported threat of Iran. We are told that Iran is a regional ogre, bent on Mideast dominance and the creation of a new Persian Empire. It is staunchly dedicated to the absolute annihilation of the state of Israel. This all makes for excellent propaganda but is just empirically false!

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