Amid Murky Intel, Experts Say Time to Be Clear: Threat of War With Iran "Solely and Unequivocally" Trump's Fault

As “murky” intelligence reports swirl and the White House works overtime to establish its narrative with evidence-free warnings of a supposedly growing Iranian threat, foreign policy experts and analysts are attempting to set the record straight by establishing precisely who is responsible for the dangerously high tensions in the Middle East that could spark a catastrophic war.

“The current crisis atmosphere in U.S.-Iranian relations, in which the risk of open warfare appears greater than it has been in years, is solely and unequivocally due to the policies and actions of the Trump administration.” 
—Paul Pillar

The unequivocal answer, according to former CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar, is the Trump administration.

“The current crisis atmosphere in U.S.-Iranian relations, in which the risk of open warfare appears greater than it has been in years, is solely and unequivocally due to the policies and actions of the Trump administration,” Pillar wrote in a Thursday column for Lobe Log.

“To point this out does not mean that actions of the Iranian regime have not come to be part of the crisis atmosphere as well,” Pillar added. “It instead means that such an atmosphere would never have existed in the first place if the administration had not turned its obsession with Iran into the relentless campaign of hostility.”

Pillar’s assessment of the growing threat of yet another U.S.-led war in the Middle East seemed to be bolstered by a Wall Street Journal report late Thursday, which suggested that intelligence collected by the American government shows “Iran’s leaders believe the U.S. planned to attack them, prompting preparation by Tehran for possible counterstrikes.”

“That view of the intelligence,” the Journal reported, “could help explain why Iranian forces and their allies took action that was seen as threatening to U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere, prompting a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf region and a drawdown of U.S. diplomats in Iraq.”

“There you have it,” Farnaz Fassihi, a senior writer for the Journal, tweeted in response to the new reporting. “Trump action provokes Iran reaction provokes U.S. reaction and suddenly march to another quagmire catastrophic war.”

This timeline of events—which was echoed by reporting from The Daily Beast Thursday—flatly contradicts the Trump administration’s insistence that Iranian aggression prompted the United States’ recent militaristic actions and threats, the most prominent of which have been issued by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Beast that the intelligence he has reviewed, which he characterized as “murky,” has led him to believe “that most of the activities that the Iranians are undertaking are in response to our very aggressive posture in the region.”