No wars under this president
Seven Questions That Need Answers Before Any Attack on Iran
President Trump’s threats of retaliation for strikes on Saudi oil facilities seem premature.
President Donald Trump says the United States is “locked and loaded” to retaliate against whoever struck Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries on Saturday. But before American forces rain “fire and fury” on Iran, some urgent questions must be answered.
Are we quite sure that Iran is the culprit?
Iranian culpability certainly seems the most plausible explanation for the refinery attack. But given the utter untrustworthiness of both the Trump presidency and Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi government, it seems wise to demand certainty, not plausibility. How confident are U.S. analysts that the attack was ordered from Tehran, rather than by an Iranian proxy acting for its own motives?
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What’s the angle?
The Trump Organization and members of the president’s family have been trousering streams of payments from the Persian Gulf since November 2016. Nobody can intelligently believe that U.S. policy is being made only with national interests in mind. That the Trump presidency may be for sale—or lease—is not everything that is going on, but it’s enough to reaffirm the first rule of foreign policy in the Trump years: No wars under this president.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/seven-questions-iran/598096/
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