Americans Are Urging Trump To Stand Firm against Iran War Drive
June 21, 2019—“I have strongly encouraged @realDonaldTrump to trust HIS instincts and avoid another war,” Sen. Rand Paul tweeted today, in response to a Business Insider story headlined “Top Aides Reportedly Urge Trump To Go to War with Iran.”
Two days before, Senator Paul told Fox News that he opposed the increase in troops being sent to Southwest Asia to counter Iran. One of the things he said he liked about Trump was that he said the Iraq War was a mistake, Paul stated. “An Iran war would be an even bigger mistake.” If our forces are shot at, they can respond in self-defense, but retaliation—blowing up a ship or dropping a bomb, as Sen. Tom Cotton, for one, is proposing—is “a completely wrong-headed and unconstitutional idea,” Paul insisted. But of all the people in the administration, the President has the best handle on this, and is less likely to act in an irrational way to go out and blow something up, the Senator said.
Col. Larry Wilkerson (ret.), then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s aide during the buildup to the disastrous Iraq War, told journalist Mehdi Hassan on his “Deconstructed” podcast yesterday that there are innumerable similarities between the techniques and methodologies being used by Bolton, Pompeo, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), et al. today to drive the U.S. into a war with Iran, and those used by Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the same FDD to get their 2003 Iraq War. Including media complicity, just as when “Cheney would take raw intelligence, feed it to the New York Times; the New York Times would then print it front page above the fold right side; and Cheney would then cite it as verified.”
“I’ve used intelligence as a military professional and a diplomat for almost half a century,” but when it comes to the story that Iran mined the oil tankers, “I wouldn’t believe any of it, as they’ve presented it, just as the Prime Minister of Japan didn’t believe it, or Germany, believe it. The credibility of United States on intelligence is really low right now.”
War in Iran would be “horrible”; it is four times the size of Iraq, has 80 million, not 26 million people, and terrain “that’s just inhospitable, almost killed Alexander the Great, for example.” He knows whereof he speaks; in 1979, he did the war planning for how to stop the Russians if they should invade Iran after their invasion of Afghanistan.
Wilkerson, likewise, said several times that he does not think President Donald Trump wants this war.
