Everyone knows Bolton is a hawk. Less
understood is how he labored in secret to drive Washington and Tehran apart.
In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous
episodes in which the United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to
indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time—in 2007, in 2008, and again in 2011—those moves, presented
in corporate media as presaging attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed
at putting pressure on the Iranian government.
But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John
Bolton as his next national security advisor creates a prospect of war with
Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative hawk. He has been
obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling
repeatedly for bombing Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the
slightest indication that he understands the consequences of such a policy.
His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired
during his tenure as the Bush administration’s policymaker on Iran from 2002
through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for the
administration to carry out military action.
More than anyone else inside or outside the Trump
administration, Bolton has already influenced Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear
deal. Bolton parlayed his connection with the primary financier behind both
Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself—the militantly Zionist casino magnate
Sheldon Adelson—to get Trump’s ear last October, just as the president was
preparing to announce his policy on the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He spoke with Trump by phone from Las
Vegas after meeting with Adelson.
It was Bolton who persuaded Trump to commit to specific language
pledging to pull out of the JCPOA if Congress and America’s European allies did
not go along with demands for major changes that were clearly calculated to
ensure the deal would fall apart.
Although Bolton was passed over for the job of secretary of
state, he now appears to have had the inside track for national security
advisor. Trump met with Bolton on March 6 and told
him, “We need you here, John,” according to a Bolton associate. Bolton said he
would only take secretary of state or national security advisor, whereupon
Trump promised, “I’ll call you really soon.” Trump then replaced Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, after which White
House sources leaked to the media Trump’s intention to
replace H.R. McMaster within a matter of weeks.
The only other possible candidate for the position mentioned in media accounts is Keith
Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was acting national security advisor
after General Michael Flynn was ousted in February 2017.
Bolton’s high-profile advocacy of war with Iran is well known.
What is not at all well known is that, when he was under secretary of state for
arms control and international security, he executed a complex and devious
strategy aimed at creating the justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. Bolton
sought to convict the Islamic Republic in the court of international public
opinion of having a covert nuclear weapons program using a combination of
diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and fabricated evidence.
Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the
supervision of Secretary of State Colin Powell, his actual boss in devising and
carrying out that strategy was Vice President Dick Cheney. Bolton was also the
administration’s main point of contact with the Israeli government, and with
Cheney’s backing, he was able to flout normal State Department rules by
taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003 and 2004 without having the required
clearance from the State Department’s Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs.
Thus, at the very moment that Powell was saying administration
policy was not to attack Iran, Bolton was working with the Israelis to lay the
groundwork for just such a war. During a February 2003 visit, Bolton assured
Israeli officials in private meetings that he had no doubt the
United States would attack Iraq, and that after taking down Saddam, it would
deal with Iran, too, as well as Syria.
During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had unannounced meetings, including with the head of Mossad, Meir
Dagan, without the usual reporting cable to the secretary of state and other
relevant offices. Judging from that report on an early Bolton visit, those meetings
clearly dealt with a joint strategy on how to bring about political conditions
for an eventual U.S. strike against Iran.
Mossad played a very aggressive role in influencing world
opinion on the Iranian nuclear program. In the summer of 2003, according to
journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their book The Nuclear Jihadist, Meir Dagan created a
new Mossad office tasked with briefing the world’s press on alleged Iranian
efforts to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The new unit’s
responsibilities included circulating documents from inside Iran as well from
outside, according to Frantz and Collins.
Bolton’s role in a joint U.S.-Israeli strategy, as he outlines in his own 2007 memoir, was to ensure
that the Iran nuclear issue would be moved out of the International Atomic
Energy Agency and into the United Nations Security Council. He was determined to prevent IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei
from reaching an agreement with Iran that would make it more difficult for the
Bush administration to demonize Tehran as posing a nuclear weapons threat. Bolton
began accusing Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program in mid-2003, but
encountered resistance not only from ElBaradei and non-aligned states, but from
Britain, France, and Germany as well.
Bolton’s strategy was based on the claim that Iran was hiding
its military nuclear program from the IAEA, and in early 2004, he came up with
a dramatic propaganda ploy: he sent a set of satellite images to the IAEA
showing sites at the Iranian military reservation at Parchin that he claimed
were being used for tests to simulate nuclear weapons. Bolton demanded that the
IAEA request access to inspect those sites and leaked his demand to the
Associated Press in September 2004. In fact, the satellite images showed
nothing more than bunkers and buildings for conventional explosives testing.
Bolton was apparently hoping the Iranian military would not
agree to any IAEA inspections based on such bogus claims, thus playing into his
propaganda theme of Iran’s “intransigence” in refusing to answer questions
about its nuclear program. But in 2005 Iran allowed the inspectors into those
sites and even let them choose several more sites to inspect. The inspectors
found no evidence of any nuclear-related activities.
The U.S.-Israeli strategy would later hit the jackpot, however,
when a large cache of documents supposedly from a covert source within Iran’s
nuclear weapons program surfaced in autumn 2004. The documents, allegedly found
on the laptop computer of one of the participants, included technical drawings
of a series of efforts to redesign Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to carry what
appeared to be a nuclear weapon.
But the whole story of the so-called “laptop documents” was a
fabrication. In 2013, a former senior German official revealed the true story to this writer:
the documents had been given to German intelligence by the Mujahedin E Khalq,
the anti-Iran armed group that was well known to have been used by Mossad to
“launder” information the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves.
Furthermore, the drawings showing the redesign that were cited as proof of a
nuclear weapons program were clearly done by someone who didn’t know that
Iran had already abandoned the Shahab-3’s nose cone for
an entirely different design.
Mossad had clearly been working on those documents in 2003 and
2004 when Bolton was meeting with Meir Dagan. Whether Bolton knew the Israelis
were preparing fake documents or not, it was the Israeli contribution towards
establishing the political basis for an American attack on Iran for which he
was the point man. Bolton reveals in his memoirs that this Cheney-directed
strategy took its cues from the Israelis, who told Bolton that the Iranians
were getting close to “the point of no return.” That was point, Bolton wrote,
at which “we could not stop their progress without using force.”
Cheney and Bolton based their war strategy on the premise that
the U.S. military would be able to consolidate control over Iraq quickly.
Instead the U.S. occupation bogged down and never fully recovered. Cheney
proposed taking advantage of a high-casualty event in Iraq that could be blamed
on Iran to attack an IRGC base in Iran in the summer of 2007. But
the risk that pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq would retaliate against U.S.
troops was a key argument against the proposal.
The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were also well aware
that Iran had the capability to retaliate directly against U.S. forces in the
region, including against warships in the Strait of Hormuz. They had no
patience for Cheney’s wild ideas about more war.
That Pentagon caution remains unchanged. But two minds in the
White House unhinged from reality could challenge that wariness—and push the
United States closer towards a dangerous war with Iran.
Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular
contributor to TAC. He is also
the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear
Scare. Follow
him on Twitter @GarethPorter.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-a-john-bolton-appointment-is-scarier-than-you-think-mcmaster-trump/