It’s always two weeks with Donald Trump, who is now working on a self-imposed two-week timeline for deciding what to do on Iran, which his own Director of National Intelligence says isn’t working on building a nuclear weapon, but anyway, he wants to bomb to keep it from being able to do so.
The danger here is so obvious that even Trump’s lifelong buddy, Vladimir Putin, is concerned that our POTUS is leading us into World War III.
“I am speaking without any irony, without any jokes. Of course, there is a lot of conflict potential, it is growing, and it is right under our noses, and it affects us directly,” the Russian dictator said at an economic forum in St. Petersburg on Friday. “And this requires, of course, not only our careful attention to the events taking place, but also the search for solutions, the search for solutions, preferably by peaceful means, in all directions.”
Putin should tell that to his subordinate, who has let himself be convinced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that now is the time to strike at Iran, which has been weakened by losses incurred by its allies in the Middle East in the past several months, but even so, do we really want another resource-draining, years-long war that will end with us tucking our tails after losing thousands of American lives and wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars?
“The one thing we know about the Middle East is it’s a lot easier to start a war there than it is to end one,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who, like congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, is uncertain on why Trump has so quickly, and so radically, changed direction on Iran.
“I mean, the president, at the beginning of this conflict, said, well, America will help Israel defend itself, but is not going to get involved. That seems to have somewhat changed in the last 24 to 48 hours, and it seems now that the president is actually trying to provoke additional action with at least some of these tweets. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation here, and I am gravely concerned that this zigzag approach is undermining confidence from our allies, it’s undermining those nations in the Middle East, in addition to Israel, who are concerned about Iran in terms of the predictability of America’s action,” Warner told reporters in a conference call on Wednesday.
Warner’s Senate colleague from Virginia, Tim Kaine, has called on Senate Republicans to assent to a debate on the Senate floor on a war powers resolution that would require U.S. participation in offensive hostilities against Iran to be explicitly authorized by Congress through a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.
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“There’s no part of the Constitution that’s more important than the Article 1 provision making plain that the United States should not be at war without a vote of Congress, yet the news of the day suggests that we are potentially on the verge of a war with Iran,” Kaine said on Tuesday.
Netanyahu has been saying for 30 years that the Iranian regime is mere weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon, and decided in recent weeks that Iran’s position on the world stage has weakened sufficiently to allow for an all-out attack.
It’s a calculation, certainly, on the part of Netanyahu, and not one that is shared by the U.S. intelligence community.
The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a Trump acolyte, testified to Congress in March that U.S. intelligence did not believe Iran was working to build a nuclear weapon, but when confronted on that by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Air Force One early Tuesday, Trump pushed back.
“I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one,” Trump said.
Maybe he ought to share what he claims to know with the rest of us.
It might just be me thinking this, but this is starting to feel like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney swearing to the world that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, which we now know, he didn’t.
Warner, actually, seems to be with me there.
“My concern now that is intelligence could be being manipulated around this conflict in the Middle East,” the senator said. “So far, at least, the intelligence community has stood by its conclusion that Iran was not moving towards a nuclear weapon. They were enriching additional uranium, but they were not weaponizing that yet, and that was left with the Supreme Leader. If there has been a change in that intelligence, I need to know, and I want to make sure that if it is changed, it’s based upon fact and not political influence.”
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Chris Graham
