Hawks and war profiteers

 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR 

There was a problem for the hawks and war profiteers. Gaza is not, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld on Afghanistan a “target-rich environment.” The Hamas attacks, which many dubbed  “Israel’s 9/11,” were ripe for exploitation into a wider war. The challenge was to identify the real culprit, the hidden hand directing Hamas’s horrorshow. It didn’t take long to settle on one: Iran. And good old Joe Lieberman, Obama’s former  mentor in the Senate, who now heads a war-mongering outfit called United Against Nuclear Iran, was one of the first to issue the West’s fatwah.

 Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan seems only slightly less eager: “Iran is complicit in this attack in a broad sense…they have supported Hamas in the past.” Well, if that’s the standard for complicity, then so is Israel, which nurtured Hamas for years as a rival to the PLO and, later, the Palestinian Authority. Take it from the Times of Israel or the Wall Street Journal…

+ CNN, now back in Iraq war mode, brought on John Bolton–who falsely claimed Iraq was behind 9/11– to assert with no evidence that Iran directed the timing of the Hamas attack.

+ The bad news Bolton and for the Bomb Iran Chorus is that according to a report by NBCNews American spy agencies have gotten intelligence that shows Iranian leaders were surprised by Hamas’ attack on Israel. Of course, such intelligence undercutting a drive for war hasn’t stopped the hawks in the past.