There’s been trumpeting of Trump Administration incompetence vis a vis Iran using the Aramco drone strike as evidence, as Business Insider reveals:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday acknowledged that the current crisis with Iran was a “direct result” of actions taken by President Donald Trump.
Since Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, his administration has engaged in a “maximum-pressure” campaign against Tehran, Iran’s capital, in an effort to cripple the Iranian economy with harsh sanctions. The end goal of this is to squeeze Iran into coming back to the negotiation table to agree to a more stringent version of the nuclear deal that prevents Iran from building nuclear weapons. …
The secretary of state was addressing the recent attack on two major Saudi oil facilities and facing questions on how the attack was possible despite Saudi investments in US defense technology, as well as how such incidents could be deterred moving forward.
But I wonder if Trump’s opponents are misunderstanding Trump and the conservative’s objections.
First, from the BI report:
If Iran is indeed responsible for the Saudi oil field attacks, experts and former US officials say Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA opened the door for the attack, as well as the broader tensions surrounding it.
Barbara Slavin, the director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said in an op-ed on Wednesday, “This is what happens when you unilaterally pull out of a nuclear deal and then try to smother another country.”
There’s an implicit selection of metric of success, and it’s the level of tension, and its child, the incidence of violence, in the Mideast.
But what if this liberal approach to Iran is not the conservative approach? What if their metric is quite different?
In other words, and as my second point, what if their goals are different?
My perception is that the liberal approach to the problem of Iran, culminating in the JCPOA, was to reduce the tension and violence incited by Iran in the region. The people of Iran would be left with the problem of governance, and if that involved violence to remove the theocratic elements, so be it.
But the conservatives, offended by a regime that had nationalized Western economic assets during the Iranian Revolution, exiled a friend of the United States in the last Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, and, for many elements of the American conservative movement, is Muslim rather than Christian, this not good enough.
They want regime change.
That’s not implicit in the JCPOA. It might occur, but the conservatives want to see it happen soon, so they can take credit for it happening. That’s why Administration officials appear to be impervious to the facts on the ground, this may be why Secretary of State Pompeo could be entirely truthful when he says:
…”There is this theme that some suggest that the president’s strategy that we allowed isn’t working. I would argue just the converse of that. I would argue that what you are seeing here is a direct result of us reversing the enormous failure of the JCPOA.”
Of course, if he is being truthful, then he misapprehends the purpose of the JCPOA. But, being the amateur that he is, he doesn’t comprehend that fact, and so to him, saying the JCPOA is a failure seems like truth-telling. But, given that regime change is their goal, the incidence of tension and violence in the Mideast isn’t a sign of failure, but a sign to them that Iran is striking out due to increasing pressures at home. They may even believe that regime change is an incipient event.
All that said, I’d like to turn to the theme of paranoia, at least on my part. Who was responsible for the Aramco attacks? I’ve mentioned Iran, Yemen, Israel, and unnamed terrorist organizations. But there is one more, barely plausible, entity in play.
And that is the United States.
I don’t speak from evidence, but only from motivations. An attack pinned, however fallaciously, on the Iranians would help the current Administration achieve a current goal, which my reader can of course guess. An excuse to attack Iran it may not be, but it certainly impacts the reputation of Iran internally and internationally. Achievement of regime change would certainly perk up both the Trump base and those segments of the conservative movement that have their doubts about Trump’s re-election efforts.
And I am certain that President Trump would have no moral qualms about trying to frame Iran. The political leadership of the victim, Saudi Arabia, may have even assented.
But this is all evidence-less speculation. If I had to order my suspects from most to least likely, it’d be unofficial Iranian elements, official Iranian elements, Israel, Yemen, and the United States as least likely.
But perhaps that’s just own moral system at work. I’d rather believe that American operational elements would have screamed rather than hit an ally’s oil facilities.
