According to a new report in The Jerusalem Post, the U.S. is planning a “massive” airstrike against an Iranian nuclear facility in response to Iran’s alleged recent attack on tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
The report cites unnamed United Nations officials who say that the U.N. is reviewing the plans.
Pompeo pushes attack
President Donald Trump is reportedly less than enthusiastic about using force against Iran, but has lost his patience with the situation and finally told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to go ahead with plans for the airstrike. Pompeo has made repeated statements condemning Iran’s actions in the Gulf of Oman and had been pushing for the airstrike, sources said.
Pompeo said there was no doubt that Iran was responsible for attacking two tankers in the Gulf of Oman. After the U.S. declared an oil embargo in April, Tehran made statements suggesting that if they couldn’t get their oil through, no one else would either.
The White House has been meeting around the clock since Friday with senior military commanders, Pentagon personnel, and Trump advisers, according to the Post.
Moving toward war?
For his part, President Trump reportedly does not want to go to war with Iran, but he acknowledges that his relationship is deteriorating. Iran has recently said for the first time that it would not keep to all the tenets of its 2015 nuclear agreement, which Trump pulled out of last year.
Specifically, Iran has said that it might enrich uranium at higher levels than the agreement allowed. It is unclear how close Iran might be to having nuclear weapons, which would provide a very dangerous threat to the rest of the Middle East and other nations around the world.
The British Admiral Lord West said last month that a war with Iran would be far deadlier than the previous Iraq war and would require at least one million troops.
For its part, Iran has also demanded that the U.S. lift economic sanctions against it before it will negotiate a new nuclear deal. But such unilateral capitulation is unlikely to happen.
Looking forward
While the impact of a U.S. airstrike against Iran is unknown, it is likely to escalate tensions even more than the current situation. If Iran decides to retaliate by killing U.S. military personnel, hawks in the media will likely call for more military action — and what was intended to be just a tactical strike could ignite full-scale military intervention.
“This is how you sell a big war: you pretend that you are selling a small war,” Iran foreign policy expert Trita Parsi said about the possibility of war with Iran. Parsi also argued that Iran can’t be counted on to be like Syria to not retaliate an airstrike, though others have suggested that they could.
While it is scary to think about a full-on war with Iran, at this point, anything can happen. Fearmongers have been saying since the first day of Trump’s presidency that he was going to get us into a war with North Korea, China, Syria, or Iran, and he has managed to keep things diplomatic so far.
Iran may be the biggest test of his diplomatic powers yet.
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