June 5, 2019
Efforts to blame Iran for acts of sabotage went nowhere — but this feels way too much like 2003 all over again
Last week a senior Pentagon official
accused Iran of having sabotaged four oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman on
May 12 and of firing a rocket into Baghdad’s Green Zone on May 19. Iran
executed these events, he said, either directly or through regional
“proxies.”
But instead of creating sensational headlines, the briefing by Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, the director of the Joint Staff, was a flop, because it was clear to reporters covering it that he could not cite a single fact to back it up.
The story got only the most cursory
coverage in major news outlets, all of which buried Gilday’s accusation
deep in stories about the announced deployment of 1,500 more U.S. troops
to the Middle East. Relatively few readers would even have noticed
Gilday’s inflammatory claims.
Nevertheless, the briefing raises a serious question whether National Security Adviser John Bolton intended to use the new accusation against Iran stoke a war crisis — much as Vice President Dick Cheney, in another era, used the argument that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes for a covert nuclear weapons program to justify the invasion of Iraq.
A careful examination of Gilday’s accusations make clear that they do not even claim to be based on any intelligence assessment.
Continue reading Porter’s analysis at Salon
Pentagon’s phony Iran “evidence”: New rationale for U.S. intervention? added by JO on
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