The familiar chorus of interventionist voices is once again gathering around President Donald Trump, reportedly pressing him to restart large-scale military operations against Iran after diplomatic efforts have stalled.
According to the Daily Caller, the president, locked in a tense standoff with Tehran, has been consulting with some of the most recognizable figures from the neoconservative wing of the foreign policy establishment: retired Gen. Jack Keane, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen and Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, according to an Axios report published Tuesday. All are advising Trump to take some kind of military action to try to break the current deadlock, the outlet reported, underscoring how quickly Washingtons old guard reaches for the use of force when negotiations prove difficult.
Graham is the most familiar name to the public, a lawmaker whose enthusiasm for military intervention is so expansive that there is scarcely a country on the map he has not been willing to threaten with bombing. Thiessen and Keane, though both Fox News contributors, operate with a lower public profile than the South Carolina hawk, yet their influence may be far more consequential behind closed doors.
If the Axios account is accurate, the pair may wield significant sway over the trajectory of this conflict and the presidents next move. That prospect should concern anyone who remembers how similar voices helped steer the United States into the disastrous Iraq War and the broader, open-ended War on Terror.
Throughout the current war, Thiessen has repeatedly urged Trump to assassinate Iranian negotiators if talks fail to produce an agreement. Earlier in April, Trump reposted Thiessens tweet, amplifying the columnists chilling proposal: If there are two factions in Iran, one that wants a deal one that doesnt, lets kill the ones who dont want a deal.
Taking a cue from Thiessen, Keane used a Fox News appearance Tuesday to call for Trump to resume strikes on Iran in order to break the stalemate. He went further, arguing that killing negotiators is a reasonable path, a stance that blurs the line between hard-nosed diplomacy and outright lawlessness.
Thiessens record offers little reassurance to those wary of another Middle Eastern quagmire. He was a vocal cheerleader for the Bush administrations invasion of Iraq, having served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and he played a key role in crafting the administrations public defense of torture during the War on Terror.
In addition to his Washington Post column, Thiessen holds a senior fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative policy shop that has long championed aggressive U.S. intervention abroad. This pedigree places him squarely within the same ideological camp that has repeatedly underestimated the costs of regime change and nation-building.
Keanes rsum is similarly rooted in the Bush-era project of remaking the Middle East by force. He was a key architect of the administrations failed nation-building effort and the 2007 troop surge, when Bush ordered 21,500 additional troops to Iraq in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a faltering occupation.
By 2014, Keane was still defending the interventionist line, declaring that pulling out of Iraq was an absolute strategic failure, as if the original decision to invade had not already imposed staggering human and financial costs. He now chairs the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that has received funding from the defense industry, raising predictable questions about the alignment of its policy prescriptions with the interests of military contractors.
Axios reported that Trump is set to receive new plans for military action in Iran from CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper, a development that suggests the White House is at least entertaining escalation. For Americans who remember how two swamp creatures who were instrumental in triggering the biggest foreign policy quagmire in American history helped sell the Iraq War, the idea that they are once again whispering in a presidents ear is more than a little alarming; for those untroubled by that history, as the original writer dryly noted, If not, well, youre in luck.
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