Mike Pompeo is off to a summit in Warsaw that is ostensibly about Middle-East security, but seems to be where various parties are sending up trial balloons about starting a war with Iran.
The Trump administration had delicately said the meeting of five dozen nations in Warsaw would focus on “Middle East security.” But the unmistakable voice of Rudolph Giuliani, an avowed proponent of regime change in Iran, set a different tone.
Hours before the meeting began, Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and President Trump’s lawyer, told an anti-Iran rally outside Warsaw’s main stadium that Iranian leaders are “assassins, they are murderers and they should be out of power.”
Mr. Giuliani said he was representing an Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or M.E.K., not Mr. Trump. But his message belied what American officials had told nervous European counterparts: that the two-day meeting would focus on a range of Middle East security matters. […]
“We want to see a regime change in Iran,” Mr. Giuliani said. — www.nytimes.com/…
War with Iran would be an enormous disaster and prior administrations have had the good sense to stay away from it. But with war-monger John Bolton in the White House, we’ve got to treat this chatter seriously. He recently ordered up options for military strikes on Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump administration grifters like Giuliani are lobbying for violent organizations like the MEK. Giuliani presumably hopes to follow in the footsteps of other war criminal Republicans like the two Bushes and Dick Cheney, who used the US military to start wars in the Middle-East and then got rich off contracts from factions that benefited. That is also the pattern so many Republican grifters like the war criminal Elliott Abrams are hoping to follow in Venezuela.
Poland has been resisting the urge to turn the summit into a propagandistic anti-Iranian meeting, underscoring its commitment to JCPOA, but as Poland’s former ambassador to Afghanistan Piotr Lukasiewicz told Al Jazeera: “[Poland] has lost control over the general message of the conference to the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.” — www.aljazeera.com/…
The Saudi regime has been spending enormous amounts of money to influence the Trump administration. They have been clear for years that they would like the US to wage war on Iran.
There’s news that the US Is restarting a program to sabotage Iranian missiles and there was a rare terrorist attack on Iranian troops which killed 23. These are all unusual, problematic events happening in close succession.
To add further fuel to the fire, there’s a strange social media incident. Benjamin Netanyahu is in Warsaw to attend this summit. While there, he said on camera that he was there to “advance the common interest of war with Iran”. His office tweeted this out:
His communications department has since replaced the tweet with one that reads “combatting Iran”, and removed the video, claiming it was a mis-translation from Hebrew. But:
According to the English translation of Netanyahu’s remarks in Hebrew prepared by his office, the prime minister then added: “What is important about this meeting — and it is not in secret because there are many of those — is that this is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries that are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran.” […]
As my colleague Talya Cooper explains, however, Netanyahu did in fact use the Hebrew word for “war” in the video, which has not yet been deleted from his Hebrew-language YouTube channel. In a separate video, posted by Netanyahu’s office on Facebook earlier in the day, the prime minister had used the Hebrew word for “combat.” — theintercept.com/…
Here is Bolton a few months ago making a wild promise about overthrowing the Iranian government:
Bolton has been going around the Fox News circuit defending his role in starting the Iraq war. And yes, the decision not to prosecute George W. Bush era war-criminals and lock them away for the rest of their lives is why we have to deal with the re-emergence of these ghouls again.
Here’s Chris Murphy warning us to watch Bolton.
— @subirgrewal