But Pompeo's description of the incidents bore little resemblance to the reality. Not only was there no danger to U.S. diplomats, but no reason to believe that any such danger was intended. On Sept. 8 and 9, two rockets fired in Baghdad landed in an "abandoned lot" near the Egyptian Embassy, according to a Reuters report -- more than one full kilometer away from the U.S. Embassy.
That same night, in southern Iraq, two rockets fired in the general direction of the U.S. Consulate, which is adjacent to the Basra International Airport, struck the airport's outer security perimeter, well away from the consulate, according to Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This indicates that they were not intended to harm the consulate, but were merely warning shots, Knights believes. On Sept. 28, three more rockets struck consulate property, but caused no damage or casualties.
The distortion of incidents that appear to have reflected a cautious political signaling by Shiite militias in order to justify a U.S. retaliatory strike against Iran presents a striking parallel with Cheney's effort to spark a war with Iran in 2007. Cheney's ploy was to claim that Iran was supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with highly lethal charges that could penetrate U.S. armored vehicles.
Other key policymakers in the Bush administration rejected Cheney's assertion that Iran was supplying those weapons, so Cheney did an end run around them: He prevailed on Bush to choose Gen. David Petraeus as the new commander in Iraq in early 2007, on the condition that Petraeus support the Cheney charge against Iran.
That summer, Cheney proposed that if the U.S. military found evidence of Iranian support for anti-U.S. forces in Iraq, it should carry out a limited strike against Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps camps in Iran used to train Shiite militia fighters in Iraq. But Pentagon officials stifled Cheney's proposal by arguing that such a move would begin a tit-for-tat escalation with Iran, according to former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State J. Scott Carpenter.
Thus, both Cheney in 2007 and Bolton and Pompeo in 2018 discussed a U.S. strike against Iran based on a fabricated Iranian threat to U.S. personnel in Iraq through "proxy" forces.
The Mythical Iranian ICBM Program
Bolton and Pompeo are pursuing another angle on Iran that parallels Cheney's. As Cheney's policymaker on Iran from 2003 to 2007, Bolton argued that Iran was threatening to get nuclear weapons. Now, Bolton and Pompeo have adopted Netanyahu's longtime argument that Iran is developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that will allow it to target the United States with nuclear weapons.
On Jan. 3, Pompeo condemned Iran for planning to launch three rockets called Space Launch Vehicles (SLV) that he said incorporate technologies "virtually identical" to what is used in intercontinental ballistic missiles. Pompeo said the planned rocket launches would violate U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which called upon Iran not to "undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons." He warned Iran that the administration "will not stand by and watch the Iranian regime's destructive policies place international stability at risk."
Pompeo and Bolton base their ICBM argument on the spurious claim that Iranian SLVs rely on technology that is essentially indistinguishable from an ICBM. But that idea has been thoroughly demolished by the leading independent specialist on the issue. Michael Elleman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in Washington, D.C., explained in detail in March 2018 why Iran's SLVs -- the Safir and the Simorghare fundamentally different from an ICBM or any other ballistic missile.
The second-stage propulsion systems for the SLVs, Elleman wrote, "rely on low-thrust, long-action time engines, which are ideal for accelerating a satellite on a path parallel to the earth's surface and into a sustainable orbit." But such engines are "poorly suited for ballistic missile trajectories," which must reach much higher altitudes, he observed.
Elleman also pointed out that the Simorgh must be "prepared for launch over an extended time on a fixed launching pad," making it "vulnerable to pre-launch attack." That would explain why, he wrote, no country has ever "converted a satellite launcher into a long-range ballistic missile."
Because Iranian SLVs cannot be considered as designed to carry a nuclear weapon, testing them is certainly not a violation of Resolution 2231, contrary to Pompeo's position. But for Pompeo and Bolton, it provides another rationale to attack Iran -- just as Cheney originally planned to use the false claim of a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program as justification for attacking Iran, until he and Bush were rebuffed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a December 2006 meeting.
These parallels between the Cheney push for war against Iran and the Pompeo-Bolton schemes to justify such a war tell only part of the story. There are differences between the two situations that could make the present danger even greater. Trump may be more manipulable by Pompeo and Bolton than George W. Bush was by Cheney. And although the military leadership is clearly still opposed to war with Iran, as it was in 2006 and 2007, it remains to be seen whether the next secretary of defense will be independent enough to stand up to Pompeo and Bolton on the issue.
On the face of it, the combination of Bolton, who seems utterly irrational about war with both Iran and North Korea, and Pompeo, who has apparently adopted extreme right-wing views on Israel as a result of his belief in "the rapture," presents a greater danger of success in precipitating war than did Cheney. Unless much stronger anti-war forces can be organized in coming months, that danger appears extremely serious.
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