Post #5258

🛢 MBS, Bibi and the President With “No Imminent Threat” Trump’s Iran war didn’t start in the Situation Room. It started on the phone with Mohammed bin Salman and on TV with Benjamin Netanyahu. For weeks, the Saudi crown prince privately pressed Trump to strike Iran. At the same time, Riyadh publicly promised not to let its airspace be used and posed as a fan of “diplomacy.” Netanyahu kept doing what he has done for years: openly pushing the U.S. to hit what he calls Israel’s existential enemy. Together they helped sell Trump on a regime‑decapitation air campaign against a country of more than 90 million people. They were pushing against U.S. intelligence, not following it. American agencies judged that Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S. homeland. Military analysts said any Iranian long‑range missile program was at least a decade away, if it even began. Nuclear inspectors reported no evidence that Iran had restarted enrichment after last summer’s strikes. Trump threw that all out and chose the stories from his favorite allies instead. Then he went on camera to talk about “imminent threats,” bombs, and payback for 1979, like this was a cable‑news sequel to the hostage crisis. The Saudi role looks especially cynical. In public, MBS talked about de‑escalation and said Saudi territory wouldn’t be used for attacks. In private, he warned U.S. officials that if Washington did not strike now — with the biggest American build‑up in the region since 2003 — Iran would come out stronger. His brother, Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman, flew to Washington in January to underline the “downsides” of not attacking. After the first U.S. wave, Iran hit Saudi targets anyway. Riyadh instantly switched to outraged statements demanding “all necessary and decisive measures” against Tehran. Inside Trump’s camp, the fantasy is that this is still “restrained.” JD Vance calls himself a skeptic of foreign wars and insists there is “no chance” of a drawn‑out conflict in the Middle East. At the same time, he backs an air war that has already hit seven countries in one term. Trump promises “heavy and pinpoint” bombing in Iran “throughout the week, or as long as necessary” to deliver “PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” It is regime change by real‑estate slogan. No plan for what happens on the ground. No clarity on who runs Iran if the system actually cracks. Just faith that smart bombs plus Twitter bravado can redesign a region. Veterans of earlier disasters are spelling out the obvious. Air power alone has a bad track record when the goal is to rewrite another country’s politics. Iraq in 2003 at least came with ground troops, a long occupation, and a giant civilian bureaucracy pretending to build a new state. This time, Trump is trying to do the deluxe regime‑change package at discount scale. The goals are the same — friendly regimes in Iran and Venezuela, crushed militias from Yemen to Somalia — but the method is cheaper: listen to a Gulf prince and an Israeli prime minister, ignore your own intel, drop bombs, and promise voters it will somehow be fast, clean, and paid for by someone else’s ruins. #Iran#Trump#Saudi#MBS#Netanyahu#war#regimeChange#USintelligence 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸