JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Check out this paragraph from Tulsi Gabbard’s prepared text in her
opening statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday:
As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer [July 2025],
Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There have been no
efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The
entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been
buried and shuttered with cement.
There you have it. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence
obliterated Trump’s case for going to war with Iran. Iran’s capacity to
enrich uranium was destroyed last year and they’ve made no effort to
resume the program. Curiously, however, Gabbard elided this paragraph
during her live testimony before the committee. She claimed, under
questioning from Sen. Mark Warner, that she skipped that crucial
paragraph because she realized that she was “running out of time.” Her
time in office is likely running out, as it should.
Gabbard’s deputy, Joe Kent, resigned from office this week, claiming
correctly that Iran posed no imminent threat to the US. Kent should
know. As director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center,
Kent saw all of the intel that Trump apparently refused to take the
time to read. Joe Kent’s no
“think-tank pansy.” He’s a hard-ass former Marine who courted the votes
of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists during his failed run for Congress
in western Washington. But according to Trump, who nominated him for
office, he always knew Kent was “very, very weak on security.” Funny, he
hired him and didn’t fire him. Kent walked out of the Executive Office
building on his own volition.
So we now have it from within the highest ranks of Trump’s own administration that the casus belli
for the war on Iran was faked, in an even more blatant sham than the
manufactured case for going to war on Iraq, a war Trump falsely claims
he opposed from the beginning. But, like John Kerry, Trump was for the
Iraq war before he was against it.
It’s worth reiterating that even before the June 2025 bombings of
Iran’s nuclear sites, there’s evidence that Iran was intent on building a
nuclear weapon (and a lot of evidence that it wasn’t), even though
perhaps they should have, given that possession of a stockpile of
nuclear weapons seems to be the only deterrent against getting attacked
by the US or Israel. Just this week, North Korea was gleefully launching
10 ballistic missiles
into the Pacific during joint military exercises by the US and South
Korea without even a squeak of protest from Kim’s former pen pal, Donald
Trump.
Again, Tulsi Gabbard said as much not long before Trump’s Operation of Midnight Hammer, testifying
before Congress that “the intelligence community continues to assess
that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei
has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in
2003,” When asked about Gabbard’s testimony, Trump snarled: “I don’t
care what she says. She’s wrong. My intelligence community is wrong,”
But he didn’t fire Gabbard for being wrong and publicly contradicting
him.
Trump, Rubio, and Witkoff have repeatedly claimed that Iran was
merely weeks away from having not only a stockpile of enriched uranium
but a nuclear weapon: “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve
had a nuclear weapon. When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things
happen.” (March 4) Trump has continued to push this lie in the last few
days, as his war has gone south: “[W]e’re doing very, very well in
Iran, knocking the hell out of them. And you have to do that. We can’t
let them have a nuclear weapon. They were two weeks away — in my
opinion, two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.” (March 17) Once
again, it’s Trump’s position that his own top intelligence appointees
are lying about his lies about going to war against Iran.
Still, not many Americans bought what Trump was trying to sell.
Support for the Iran war remains at around 40 percent. And the fog of
lies began to rapidly dissipate when Trump’s little excursion ran
aground on the Strait of Hormuz, shattering the global economy and
unleashing chaos across the region.
In an interview with Medhi Hassan, Senator Chris Van Hollen claimed Trump was duped by Netanyahu into going to war with Iran:
They’ve had these constantly shifting rationales, and the
reason they have to keep shifting them is because when they say that
one thing was their goal – like getting rid of Iran’s nuclear capacity,
they claimed – that turns out to be just not true….Netanyahu just a few
weeks ago said he’d been waiting 40 years for an American president to
join him in attacking Iran. And in Donald Trump, he finally found
somebody stupid enough and reckless enough to actually do it.
Sorry, Senator, but this lets Trump off the hook. Iran has been on
Trump’s targeting radar since Obama signed the nuclear deal. He
assassinated Qasem Suleimani, head of the IRG’s Al Quds Force, in 2020
and bombed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June. As the Epstein
scandal engulfed Trump, he began talking up another bombing campaign on
Iran and the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores fed his
delusion that he could pull off a similar pain-free operation in Iran, a
delusion Netanyahu was eager to stoke, against all intelligence to the
contrary.
Perhaps Trump will now replace Joe Kent with Newt Gingrich, who is
very, very strong on security. So strong that Newt, the Edward Teller of
our tormented times, advised Trump to drop 12 thermo-nuclear bombs
on Iran to blast out a canal by-passing the Strait of Hormuz. In other
words, someone with the guts to start a nuclear holocaust to prevent
one.
COUNTERPUNCH
