State Dept. Orders Personnel to Leave Iraq

The State Department gave the order today on May 15 for non-emergency U.S. government employees in Iraq to leave its Baghdad embassy and the consulate in Erbil because of tensions with Iran the neighboring country.

The State Dept. also advised that Americans should not travel to Iraq, due to “terrorism, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”

This order follows national security adviser John Bolton announcing earlier this month that the U.S. would be “sending a carrier strike group to the Middle East to send a clear and unmistakable message to Iran.”

While Bolton emphasized that the U.S. wasn’t seeking to go to war with Iran, but also mentioned that “we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”

U.S. intelligence claimed the decision to send forces into the Middle East was based on intelligence that showed the Iranian regime told its proxy forces and surrogates to go after American military personnel and assets in the region (Iraq and Syria), a few U.S. officials told CNN.

The U.S. has also considered deploying up to 120,000 troops to the region in case of Iranian attempts to make serious moves against U.S. allies and military bases.

However, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations denied these claims last week, and accused American officials of employing “fake intelligence.”

War Under False Pretenses

According to British Army Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika who is in charge of anti-ISIS coalition forces in a close allied military coalition, during a Pentagon press conference on Tuesday, he stated, “No – there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.”

Ghika asserted this confidently in a video-link briefing from Baghdad to the Pentagon in response to a CNN question.

Ghika added that, “We’re aware of that presence, clearly. And we monitor them along with a whole range of others because that’s the environment we’re in. We are monitoring the Shia militia groups. I think you’re referring to carefully and if the threat level seems to go up then we’ll raise our force protection measures accordingly.”

However, only hours later, there was a swift rebuke from the U.S. side claiming that Ghika’s words were inaccurate, and insisted that coalition troops in the region were at a “high level of alert” because of the “Iran threat.”

The statement by the U.S. continued suggesting the British general did not have a grasp on troop readiness and the heightened alert of the same soldiers he himself commands.

This sounds like a false pretense in the making similar to the Iraq War.

The Guardian lost its support of the U.S. on this and wrote about its concerns of fabricated or exaggerated intelligence that may be being used by “administration hawks”, namely John Bolton, to further the case for war against Iran, which is reminiscent of the buildup to the Iraq War invasion.

Keep in mind that national security adviser John Bolton has been hungry for war, and has made this clear in the past before his position in the Trump administration.

According to National Interest, a pro-U.S.-Military propaganda that is often featured on Yahoo News, said that Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, May 14 made claims that drones attacked an oil pipeline, which caused a severe fire that disrupted oil operations.

Yemeni rebels, the same ones funded by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, with Al-Qaeda links and backed by U.S., claimed responsibility for the drone attack. The Saudi’s reported that a couple infrastructure sites were targeted at the same time of this attack.

Are the people in the United States to believe anything coming from Saudi Arabia as “legit” after the murder of Journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the subsequent cover up by the Trump Administration?

To further complicate things, National Interest reported in the same article about Saudi, Norwegian and Emirati oil tankers being attacked, and that the U.S. military assessment indicated that Iranian-affiliates agents used explosives to blow holes in the ships.

Based on past experience, these claims just don’t add up. With Iran’s non-invasive history over the past 150 years the Iranians have no reason to attack Norwegian oil tankers. As for the Saudi and Emirati oil tankers and Norwegian combined, their past record shows that Iran is not the type of country to be the aggressor in initiating phase 2 of World War III.

Also, where is this “U.S. military assessment” coming from? The U.S. and Saudi Arabia are allies, and the Saudi’s have a bitter history of being at odds with Iran. It is accurate to say that this U.S. military assessment is solely based on “because Saudi Arabia said so,” and nothing more.

False Pretenses or False Flag events have been used in the past to get countries into war. These are covert operations meant to deceive allies into war. Saudi Arabia was involved in a false flag attack designated 9/11, as evidenced in the 28 pages that were finally declassified 13 years after the 9/11 commission report.

That attack costed millions of lives and has lead the US into war with Iraq and Afghanistan that still continues to this day. . Is the U.S. willing to go to war over Saudi Arabia again?

Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. was most likely correct when they accused U.S. officials of employing “fake intelligence.”

Reminiscent of the Iraq War

When the U.S. waged war on Iraq in 2003, following the events of 9/11 and then President George W. Bush declaring the “war on terror”, it was soon proven that the Iraq War was “waged on false intelligence.” The Guardian published a detailed report in 2004 about why this was true.

The U.S. launched a war on Iraq on the basis of false and overstated intelligence according to The Guardian.

Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) at the time who chaired the bipartisan U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released a report. The report said the CIA assessments that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons, and would be able to produce nuclear weapons by the of the decade were wrong.

“As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence,” Sen. Pat Roberts said.

According to the committees vice chairman at the time, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D), he told reporters that, “We in Congress would not have authorized that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now.”

However, President George W. Bush was not innocent in all of this, with his over-exaggerating and mischaracterization of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s). No WMD’s were ever found during the Iraq War, but numerous soldiers lives were lost on both sides, and the U.S. carelessly spent trillions of dollars on that war.

So, Iran would not be the first time the U.S. used false intelligence to wage a war if war does happen, since it already happened in Iraq.

U.S. / Iran Comparison

The United States has been involved in numerous regime change wars over time, and the people of those countries end up being far more worse off than before U.S. involvement. The same goes for the U.S. placing sanctions on a country, it most always has not worked out for the sanction imposed country.

Iran on the other hand, does have a history of aggression, but has not invaded another country in over 150 years. There have been squabbles since then, but mostly from other countries attempting to invade or attack Iran.

Overall, Iran is far less of an aggressor interventionist than the U.S.and the United States has been at war 222 of the 239 years since 1776

Also the U.S. had imposed sanctions on Iranian oil, and by April of 2019, the U.S. moved to end sanctions exemptions for major Iranian oil importers, and it succeeded.

President Donald Trump’s Role in Iran War

Contrary to what some might believe, a sitting President can in fact be impeached during wartime, including President Trump. However, wartime has been known to give a sitting president a boost in support for re-election. The Iraq war did in fact give President G.W. Bush a boost in support, and helped him get re-elected to a second term.

President Trump did pull out of the Iran Nuclear Deal in May of 2018, and that is what seemed as being the beginning of newly founded tensions between the U.S and Iran.

Will the Trump Administration seek the required approval for a war with Iran from congress and have it held to a vote? With the administration’s past unrelated and current Iran actions, it may not, and will have gotten us into an illegal declaration of war.

However, the current administration may continue its false intelligence and false pretenses to try and justify waging war with Iran, and attempt to avoid congressional approval.

Politicians, Media, Oppose War with Iran

Yesterday, The Washington Post released an article titled, “A conflict with Iran would not be like the Iraq War. It would be worse.” The mega online newspapers expressed its concerns, and is opposed to a war with Iran.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who is running for president in 2020, strongly opposes a war with Iran. Senator Sanders had this to say on Twitter:

Will the U.S. Public accept war with Iran?

Not only would a war with Iran cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, it would very possibly lead to World War III, and most importantly could cost upwards of millions of lives lost, including the lives U.S military service members.

The United States saw what happened with false pretenses that led to the Iraq War, and must not let it happen again, for the world’s own sanity, well-being, and need for peace.

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