Considering a plan to bomb Iran’s key nuclear site, 74-year-old President Donald Trump asked the Pentagon to look into the feasibility of eradicating Iran’s nuclear stockpile now exceeding limits of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA]. Trump backed the U.S. out of the Obama-brokered JCPOA May 8, 2018 due to Iran’s noncompliance, but, more importantly, the Persian nation’s state sponsor of terrorism. Iran has funded and engaged in a proxy war with Saudi Arabia, supplying arms-and-cash to Houthi rebels in Yemen, battling the Kingdom since 2015. When Iran-sponsored HouthiS attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq-Khurais oil refinery Sept 14, 2019, it was clear that Iran was a menace in the region, now indirectly attacking U.S. interests, a major ally of Saudi Arabia. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA was based on Iran’s ongoing state-sponsored terrorism.
After losing the Nov. 3 election, Trump’s in no position to take any military action before leaving office Jan. 20, 2021. Meeting last Thursday in the Oval Office, Trump met with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and Gen. Mark Miley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff to discuss options on Iran. Even if Trump won the election, it’s doubtful the U.S. would take such draconic action without consulting U.S. allies. U.S. allies and adversaries, currently signers on the JCPOA, would not back any military action against Iran, especially Russia and China. But neither would the U.K., France and Germany, all hoping to reinstate the JCPOA to work with Iran on any remaining issues. Trump’s election loss precludes any military response in Iran or any other hot spot that could emerge in the next two months.
Trump asked for the meetings to weigh options of what could be a developing problem for the Biden administration, if Iran continues to violate its uranium enrichment stockpiles. “He asked for options. They gave him the scenarios and he ultimately decided not to go forward,” said an unnamed Pentagon official. Unlike former President Barack Obama and Biden, Trump’s been more reluctant than his predecessors to involve the U.S. in Mideast conflicts. Getting his military advisers together was his obligation as commander-in-chief, to ascertain his options dealing with potential national security threats. U.S. media immediately framed the Oval Office meeting as Trump trying to get the U.S. into another Mideast conflict, when in fact it’s the opposite. Biden is far more likely to embroil the U.S. in Mideast war than Trump, something the press completely ignored during the campaign.
Obama and Biden, after all, backed for eight years the Saudi proxy war to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Barack and Joe supplied Syrian rebel groups arms-and-cash for eight years, resulting in the worst humanitarian crisis since WW II. Together with the European Union, Obama and Biden caused nearly 500,000 deaths, driving 15 million Syrians to refugee status, flooding neighboring countries and Europe with Syrian immigrants. EU officials fully backed the Saudi and U.S. proxy war against Bashar al-Assad. When Putin joined the fight in Sept. 2015 Obama and Biden’s strategy backfired. Pressured to relocate Syrian refugees off the battlefield practically broke up the EU but eventually drove the U.K. out of the EU. Trump’s foreign policy did everything possible to avoid wasting U.S. blood-and-treasure in the Mideast, something not mentioned by the U.S. press.
Trump learned yesterday that Iran’s moving advanced centrifuges from an above-ground facility to its main underground facility at Natanz, breaching the 2015 JCPOA. U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] said Iran now stockpiles 2.4 tons of low-grade fissile material, far above the 202.8 kg limit specified in the JCPOA. Iran produced 337.5 kg of fissile material a quarter, less than the 500 kg in previous quarters. IAEA has no enforcement authority and could grossly underestimate the actual volumes of enriched uranium. While Iran claims its enriched uranium is for peaceful purposes, to run nuclear reactors or medial research, the Western alliance thinks Iran’s working on their first nuclear bomb. U.S. and European media blamed Trump for pulling out of Obama’s JCPOA, when the U.S. needed to have more leverage with Iran.
Iran looks forward to dealing with Biden who has shown more reluctance to challenge Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Obama and Biden had no problem toppling Col. Muammar Gaddafi Oct. 20, 2011, swamping Libya with Islamic terrorists. Obama and Biden’s policy resulted in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing 52-year-old Amb. Chris Stevens the three other Americans. But the media blamed former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the failed Mideast and North African policy that unleashed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] on the Mideast and the world. Trump took the military’s handcuffs off, changing the rules of engagement, eventually killing ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Oct. 26, 2019, making the U.S. and world a safer place. But true to form, Trump got no credit eliminating al-Bagdadi and the ISIS caliphate.
