Although US President Donald Trump
has explicitly rejected his predecessors—in extraordinary, unsparing terms— his staffing choices,
alliances with facets of the hawkish right, and boisterous nullification of the
Iran nuclear deal have left many to wonder: will Trump try to vanquish Tehran
in battle?
Democrats in Congress’ upper chamber
apparently think so, Curt Mills wrote in The National Interest. “Sixteen years
after the US invasion of Iraq, we are again barreling toward another unnecessary
conflict in the Middle East based on faulty and misleading logic,” write Senators Dick Durbin and Tom Udall, both Democrats. The Trump administration’s Iran
policy is “built on the ashes of the failed Iraq policy.”
“There
is speculation that administration officials are considering striking Iranian
territory or its proxies,” write Dick Durbin and Tom Udall, both Democrats.
The president’s attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, while making clear he did not speak
for the White House on this issue, has told me the US position
is essentially regime change.
Though
the president has insisted he would meet with the Iranian leadership, on the
North Korean model, it’s been crickets from Tehran. That suits
seemingly everyone else in the administration, except maybe the president, just
fine.
In
this mille-feuille government, in addition to Bolton, Mike Pompeo’s State
Department has been as fulsome an opponent of the Iranian regime as any
entity—with officials taking to social media, sometimes bizarrely, to make
their case.
Len
Khodorkovsky, a digital strategy official, is a proud, near-daily regime
antagonist online.
Pompeo
himself, on Wednesday, took questions from the Iranian people in an online
format. Said Pompeo: “The U.S. has great respect for the people of #Iran, and I
believe it’s important for us to hear from them directly. So I asked the
Iranian people to send me questions. I received more than 100,000 questions. Go
to @USAdarFarsi to see my answers to many of them.”
Brian
Hook, Foggy Bottom’s Iran point man, recently released a video of himself
touring the abandoned, but kept-up Iranian facility on Washington’s Embassy
Row.
On
the occasion of the Iranian Revolution's fortieth anniversary, Hook, from the
old embassy’s steps said: “The United States hopes the next forty years look
radically different, as you, the people of the Iran, take your rightful place
as a vibrant force for stability and prosperity in the Middle East and beyond.”
