In Latest Round of Iran Provocations, Israel is Missing a Top Gun — Jeffrey Goldberg

• In Latest Round of Iran Provocations, Israel is Missing a Top Gun — Jeffrey Goldberg
  by Philip Weiss, https://mondoweiss.net/
  As the Trump administration pursues a policy of provocation with Iran that could result in a war few Americans want, we should recognize that we’ve been here before. In 2010-2012, Israel and Saudi Arabia wanted the U.S. to attack Iran, and then too Americans had no stomach for war, and President Barack Obama refused to attack. Obama did ramp up sanctions, resulting in the negotiations that led to the Iran deal in 2015.
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  Now Trump has trashed Obama’s deal and gone in for a lot of bellicose rhetoric about the “official end” of Iran. But he pulled back last week from more open hostilities because he plainly does not want war– it would be a political disaster for him– and is reported to be incensed at the very war cabinet he put in place. “These people want to push us into a war, and it’s so disgusting,” Trump is said to have commented on his inner circle. That circle is there because Trump is under pressure from his largest donor, Sheldon Adelson, who once urged Obama to nuke Iran.
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  Six years ago, Obama was under his own set of pressures. “Prime Minister Netanyahu was urging President Obama to bomb Iran,” John Kerry said in 2017. The Saudis also urged the U.S. to attack Iran, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.
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  Obama was also being pressed by the establishment press. Jeffrey Goldberg was then the leading reporter on Middle East issues, with close ties to Israel, where he had once served in uniform; and he was a conduit for Israeli threats to attack Iran, notably in an Atlantic magazine cover article in 2010, titled, “The Point of No Return”, which asserted on the basis of anonymous interviews with Israeli security officials that Israel was likely to attack Iran in the next year or so because of its nuclear program– so maybe the U.S. should do the job right because it was going to get dragged in anyway.
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  Israel never did attack Iran, of course; and many have said such reports were disinformation aimed at pushing the Americans into an attack.
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