Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2019, pp. 38-42
Three Views
Is America Ready for John Bolton’s War with Iran?
By Scott Ritter
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER JOHN BOLTON’S ANNOUNCEMENT in early May that the U.S. is deploying a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region seemed perfectly framed to put America on a war footing with Iran. And it is.
Claiming that the decision was made in response to “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” Bolton declared that “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime.” But, he added, “we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”
It took the Defense Department a full day to respond to Bolton’s statement, with acting Secretary of Defense Pat Shanahan finally tweeting that the “announced deployment of the @CVN_72 and a @USAirForce bomber task force to the @CENTCOM area of responsibility…represents a prudent repositioning of assets in response to indications of a credible threat by Iranian regime forces.”
Shanahan followed with another tweet: “We call on the Iranian regime to cease all provocation. We will hold the Iranian regime accountable for any attack on U.S. forces or our interests.”
The USS Abraham Lincoln battle group had deployed a month ago from its Norfolk, VA home port and was recently engaged in maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea. The Pentagon acknowledged that the Abraham Lincoln was scheduled to support CENTCOM during its deployment, but that its arrival was being “accelerated” due to intelligence indicating an imminent Iranian threat.
The fact that Bolton chose to repurpose routine deployments of U.S. military forces into the Middle East as an emergency response to an unspecified threat from Iran is in and of itself a curiosity. Bolton is an adviser to the president, a non-statutory (i.e., not confirmed by the Senate) member of the White House staff who is not in the military chain of command and lacks any command authority.
While Shanahan followed up indicating that the orders for the deployments had been authorized by him the day of Bolton’s announcement, this simply isn’t the case—they were authorized well prior to Bolton’s statement. The fact that the White House announced the deployment of U.S. military forces in response to allegations of an emerging threat in the Middle East, as opposed to by the Pentagon, reflects the political and operational roots of the current crisis.
“U.S. Central Command [CENTCOM, the U.S. unified military command responsible for the Middle East] continues to track a number of credible threat streams emanating from the regime in Iran throughout the CENTCOM area of responsibility,” a CENTCOM spokesman noted after Shanahan’s tweet.
This threat was deemed serious enough for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel a long-planned visit with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. Pompeo instead made a secret trip to Baghdad, where, according to reports, he met with Iraq’s political and national security leadership to discuss the emerging threat from Iran.
In a statement made to reporters on his way to Baghdad, Pompeo declared that “it is absolutely the case that we have seen escalatory actions from the Iranians, and it is equally the case that we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests.” He added, “If these actions take place, if they do by some third-party proxy—a militia group, Hezbollah—we will hold the Iranian leadership directly accountable for that.”
But the reality is that the deployment of American military forces and the diversion of the secretary of state to Baghdad is little more than grand theater. This is being done in support of a policy dictated by Israeli intelligence and passed to Bolton during a meeting on April 16, 2019 at the White House, where, according to Bolton, they discussed “Iranian malign activity and other destabilizing actors in the Middle East and around the world.”
The intelligence, derived from analysis conducted by the Mossad, consisted of “scenarios” regarding what Iran “might” be planning. According to an Israeli official, “It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it, but it is clear to us that the Iranian temperature is on the rise as a result of the growing U.S. pressure campaign against them, and they are considering retaliating against U.S. interests in the Gulf.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has derided Bolton’s statements as directed by what he derisively termed the “B-team,” which includes Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Zarif accuses Bolton, in concert with the rest of the “B-team,” of trying to push President Trump “into a confrontation he doesn’t want.”
The precise nature of the supposed Iranian threat hasn’t been officially articulated by either the White House or the Pentagon. CENTCOM had nebulously noted that “recent and clear indications that Iranian and Iranian proxy forces were making preparations to possibly attack U.S. forces in the region,” and added that the threats were both maritime and on land.
However, CNN, citing unnamed Pentagon officials, has reported that specific intelligence that Iran was moving short-range ballistic missiles by boat into the Persian Gulf, combined with other indicators, is what triggered the military deployment, and that additional deployments of American forces, including Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missiles, was being considered. “It’s not clear if Iran could launch the missiles from the boats or if they are transporting them to be used by Iranian forces on land,” CNN reported.
This statement is facially absurd. Iran possesses a well-known family of short-range ballistic missiles derived from an indigenously produced copy of the Frog-7, a Russian-made short-range artillery rocket. This weapon, known as the Zelzal-2, has been exported to Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, where it has been used against Syrian rebels, Saudi-backed opponents of the Houthis, and Israel. The Zelzal-2, lacking a guidance and control system, is not a short-range ballistic missile, but rather an unguided rocket projectile. Iran does, however, possess two derivatives of the Zelzal-2—the Fateh-110 and the Zulfiquar—which meet the technical definition of a short-range ballistic missile.
The Fateh-110 has been exported to Hezbollah, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq. In September 2018, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired seven Fateh-110 missiles against Iranian Kurdish opposition forces based in northern Iraq. An even more advanced derivative of the Zelzal-2, known as the Zulfiqar, has recently entered service; in June 2017 and in October 2018, the IRGC fired Zulfiqar surface-to-surface ballistic missiles against ISIS targets located inside Syria.
These missiles are real, and they do pose an active and ongoing threat to American forces deployed in the Middle East. But they are not designed to be operated aboard a ship. Iran has already been accused of supplying Houthi rebel forces with short- and medium-range ballistic missiles via maritime supply routes. A continuation of this activity should hardly trigger a crisis requiring the emergency deployment of U.S. forces. Likewise, Iran has provided short-range ballistic missiles to both Syria and Hezbollah using an existing air bridge between Tehran and Damascus.
Finally, Iran has transferred short-range ballistic missiles to the Iraqi popular militias, Shiite groups affiliated with the IRGC. All this activity has taken place over the course of the past few years and, except for the Houthis, none have required missiles to be sent via sea.
The threat being promulgated by Bolton, CENTCOM, Pompeo, and the media ignores the reality that Iran has been preparing to strike American military forces in the Middle East for years as part of its efforts toward self-defense. Iran’s short-range ballistic missile capability is part of a larger missile threat that could, at a moment’s notice, blanket U.S. bases in the region with high explosives. Dispatching the Abraham Lincoln battle group and a B-52 task force to the Middle East is an act of theatrical bravado that will do nothing to change that. Iran’s missile force is, for the most part, mobile.
The American experience in the Gulf War, and Saudi Arabia’s experience in Yemen, should underscore the reality that mobile relocatable targets such as Iran’s missile arsenal are virtually impossible to interdict through airpower.
By purposefully escalating tensions with Iran using manufactured intelligence about an all too real threat, Bolton is setting the country up for a war it is not prepared to fight and most likely cannot win. This point is driven home by the fact that Mike Pompeo was recalled from his trip to participate in a National Security Council meeting where the Pentagon laid out in stark detail the realities of a military conflict with Iran, including the high costs. (Hopefully, they emphasized that Iran would win such a war simply by not losing—all they’d have to do is ride out any American attack.)
That Israel is behind the scenes supplying the intelligence and motivation makes Bolton’s actions even more questionable. It shows that it is John Bolton, not Iran, who poses the greatest threat to American national security today.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Dealbreaker: Donald Trump and the Unmaking of the Iran Nuclear Deal. This article was published May 10, 2019 in The American Conservative. Reprinted with permission.
Bolton, Iran and Hegemonic Hubris
By Shahed Ghoreishi
IN MAY, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER JOHN BOLTON announced that the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and Air Force bombers were rerouted to the Persian Gulf because of “new threats” emanating from Iran and its Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria. U.S. officials have privately declared that the vague intelligence, which Israel apparently passed to the United States, is “completely blown out of proportion.” As Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told The New York Times, “in the absence of some solid evidence about what triggered this action, it feels like the U.S. is picking and choosing what it considers a threat.”
The threat inflation of Iran, a country with a far smaller defense budget than its neighbors, attracts the attention of hawks like Bolton for one specific reason. They want to prevent Iran from becoming a legitimate, independent power outside the U.S. orbit. In their view, this requires capitulation or regime change. It is the latest example of America’s hegemonic hubris.
Bolton’s view of the world is a mix of what realist scholar Stephen Walt calls “hegemonic hubris” with a dash of hawkish unilateralism. According to Walt, the post-Cold War era was one of “hubristic fantasy,” leading the foreign policy elite to “believe they had the right, the responsibility, and the wisdom to shape political arrangements in every corner of the world.” Mix in Bolton’s hatred of multilateralism and it’s a recipe for strategic disaster. There’s a reason why Bolton framed the executive order President Trump signed that pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). It’s everything Bolton stands for.
It’s also a complete refutation of President Obama’s foreign policy doctrine on the Middle East.
Whereas the United States mostly accepted Russia and China as independent powers worthy of engagement, Iran had largely remained a pariah since its revolution in 1979. The Obama administration wanted to change that by pursuing diplomacy. The successful result, the JCPOA, could have become a diplomatic foundation to discuss other issues and might have led the United States to accept Iran’s role in its region. In such a case, the U.S. could have pursued offshore balancing in the Middle East and pivot away, allowing Saudi Arabia and Iran, in President Obama’s own words, to “share the region.” In other words, the JCPOA was an attempt to refocus U.S. foreign policy on more pressing issues, like the major role China is now playing on the global stage, while avoiding another costly Middle Eastern quagmire.
This is not moral leadership. It’s not even a strategy. It’s economic torture.
Bolton, on the other hand, views the United States as a unilateral hegemon that can pressure any country, small or large, as desired. He has threatened not only Iran (“bomb Iran”), but also Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. However, this is an outdated and misplaced take on U.S. power. After Bolton rerouted the United States toward confronting Iran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced reduced compliance with the JCPOA. This outcome is not in the interest of the United States. It undermines U.S. allies, handicaps global disarmament efforts, and limits U.S. strategic flexibility in the Middle East by locking in relations with intransigent allies.
Meanwhile, regular Iranians are the real victims of this strategy. The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran has caused the country’s economy to shrink by 3.9 percent in 2018 and inflation to skyrocket to 31 percent. The costs of red meat and poultry, cheese and eggs, and vegetables increased by 57 percent, 37 percent, and 47 percent respectively. The economy is expected to shrink another 6 percent in 2019.
If Iran’s human rights track record were an honest concern, then the Trump administration would realize that sanctions only make the situation worse for regular Iranians. By limiting the country’s access to foreign markets, for instance, the U.S. is strengthening the Revolutionary Guard’s influence over the economy. If Iran’s foreign policy were the main concern, then the Trump administration would have stayed in the JCPOA as a way to address outstanding concerns all while not undermining an agreement that prevents Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, the Trump administration’s foreign policy team demands regime change. As a senior Trump foreign policy official puts it: “we can collapse their economy—it’s not that difficult. But it’s up to the Iranian people.” This is not moral leadership. It’s not even a strategy. It’s economic torture.
It also won’t work. As veteran diplomat William Burns explains in Foreign Policy, “false assumptions about how a muscular, unilateralist U.S. approach can produce the capitulation or implosion of this Iranian regime, which I think is an assumption untethered to history.”
Now that the Trump administration has decided to welcome Iranians celebrating the first day of Ramadan with threats from a national security adviser known to twist intelligence, it’s up to not only Democrats but all of Congress and the media to pay attention to the escalating tensions with Iran. Like its Yemen policy, the Trump administration’s Iran policy is mean-spirited, misguided and an unnecessary drain on its global influence. It also accelerates the decline of U.S. hegemony that Bolton so fears, especially if the implosion strategy turns into an actual U.S. intervention.
Only four years ago, the Iranian people were dancing in the streets at the possibility of a brighter future post-JCPOA. With a travel ban and economic sanctions in place and touting a policy of “unrelenting force,” the Trump administration has purposefully dashed their hopes. For now, the Iranian people will have to shoulder the burden of an administration “picking and choosing” enmity inspired by the last throes of hegemonic hubris.
Shahed Ghoreishi is a U.S. foreign policy analyst, focusing on U.S. grand strategy and the Middle East. He’s previously published pieces for the Huffington Post, the Atlantic, and CSIS’s cogitASIA program. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies with concentrations in American foreign policy and Middle East studies. He is on Twitter @shahedghoreishi.
The Media’s Shameful Handling of Bolton’s Iran Threat Claims Recalls the Run-up to the Iraq War
By Ben Armbruster
MEDIA-SAVVY U.S. GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS, political operatives, and lawmakers and their staffs from all political parties and ideological persuasions have no doubt, throughout the history of our great country, duped a fair-minded but unwitting reporter into writing a juicy story in order to get a piece of information into the public bloodstream without their fingerprints on it.
This is, in large part, how the Bush administration sold the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the American people: Feeding knowingly bogus or unsubstantiated intelligence on Iraq’s (nonexistent) WMD programs to reporters, who then published it as fact, without much in the way of critical scrutiny.
Despite the lessons we’ve learned from that debacle, it’s happening again with regard to the Trump administration’s march toward war with Iran.
In one now infamous incident during the months leading up to the start of the Iraq war, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and issued a dire warning. Saddam Hussain was trying “through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs…specifically aluminum tubes.”
But Cheney made sure to point out that he wasn’t just making this assertion out of thin air (or passing on classified material), but that, in fact, the claim came from the paper of record, The New York Times.
The Times story was even the catalyst for then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s infamous assertion: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
We have since learned, of course, that Bush administration officials deliberately leaked the story to Times reporter Judith Miller—who co-wrote the big front page scoop with her colleague Michael Gordon—to build the case that that Saddam was building nuclear bombs. The Times later walked back the reporting, saying there was some internal disagreement about what the tubes were actually for (and in truth, it turned out, the tubes were actually not made for nuclear weapons).
We saw a similar dynamic play out in May, albeit on a smaller scale, after Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton issued an unusual statement announcing that the U.S. was sending a carrier and bomber group to the Middle East to counter unspecified Iranian threats.
Instead of expressing skepticism about such a statement from someone who’s been gunning for war with Iran for nearly two decades, and from an administration that has been doing the same for the past two and a half years, reports from U.S. mainstream media outlets basically served as a public relations service, simply repeating Bolton’s statement with little scrutiny across multiple mediums. For example, this was a headline from CNN the next day: “U.S. deploying carrier and bomber task force in response to ‘troubling’ Iran actions.”
Much of the piece then repeated almost verbatim administration claims about the supposed Iranian threat. And it wasn’t until the 24th paragraph that the story noted that such deployments are “routine” and that the carrier group in question, the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, had already been deployed to “the Central Command region,” as Bolton put it in his statement.
If the Lincoln group had already been deployed, was Bolton —again, who has made it no secret that he’s wanted war with Iran for some time—simply using this routine matter to goad Iran into some kind of conflict? CNN asked no such questions.
Then there was the question of the intelligence itself. Was it accurate? Was John Bolton—who also has a well-documented history of manipulating intelligence for his own policy preferences—playing fast and loose with the facts?
Here again, U.S. reporters simply just repeated Trump administration claims of this alleged dire Iranian threat. For example, this is what CNN’s Barbara Starr tweeted the following day: “Just In: U.S. officials tell me the threats from Iran included ‘specific and credible’ intelligence that Iranian forces and proxies were targeting U.S. forces in Syria, Iraq and at sea. There were multiple threads of intelligence about multiple locations, the officials said. #Iran.”
But that turned out to be false, or misleading at best. Subsequent news stories reported that the intelligence Bolton was working from was “unclear.” Other reports referred to unnamed U.S. officials citing “potential preparations,” intel that “may indicate possible attacks,” and that the U.S. “was not expecting any imminent Iranian attack.” So in other words, nothing concrete, specific, or severe enough to merit an entire carrier group and B-52 bombers being sent to the Middle East.
Later in the week, Starr (like many, many other reporters) was duped again, reporting—based on unnamed sources—that “[i]ntelligence showing that Iran is likely moving short-range ballistic missiles aboard boats in the Persian Gulf was one of the critical reasons the U.S. decided to move an aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers into the region.” But a subsequent NBC report downplayed this claim, noting that U.S. officials have actually “accused Iran of moving missiles and missile components through the region’s waterways for years.”
However, that NBC story too was guilty of uncritically repeating unnamed officials’ claims about intelligence on Iran, asserting that the actual reason for the increased U.S. military posture in the region was “a call [by Iran’s leaders] to awaken and activate” Iranian proxies in Iraq.
But what does that even mean? Does this kind of “threat” necessitate such a gargantuan military response? And isn’t it possible that the Trump administration’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign toward Iran and ramping up threats (like designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps a terror group) might have caused the Iranians themselves to shift to high alert?
Here again though, buried at the end of the NBC story, we are provided with a take from a Democratic congressional source who has seen the same intelligence, saying Trump and Bolton’s response to it “seems wildly out of proportion.” Even so, we should think a reporter would be able to conclude that the threat was overblown on his or her own (is a call to a proxy really cause for such a drastic military response?).
And that’s exactly what this intelligence is: overblown. The Daily Beast reported this week that “multiple sources close to the situation” said Bolton and Team Trump blew the intelligence on Iran “out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.”
Unfortunately, the damage has already most likely been done. The Trump administration’s claims about this supposed Iranian threat has been repeated by credulous reporters and TV news programs far and wide. And after all, that was the goal. Bolton and Co. knew the media would take the bait for a few days (war and conflict sell after all) and that, by the time the truth about what they were up to was eventually uncovered, the narrative about dire and nefarious Iranian threats—which is already baked into the American psyche anyway—would, in the saying often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill or Mark Twain, have “travel[ed] halfway around the world while the truth was still putting on its shoes.”
Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress. Published May 11 on LobeLog.
