James North
MONDOWEISS
Mondoweiss reminds us that the Trump mafia was pushing for an attack on Iran even in the waning days of the administration, but the mainstream journos simply ignored the story. The hostility toward Iran, however, is fully bipartisan.
Afrightening report in the New Yorker has just revealed that Donald Trump nearly started a war with Iran after he lost the election — a story the mainstream media mostly missed back then.
This site ran at least 4 different warnings at the time.
The New Yorker’s source is apparently General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who seems to be leaking all over the place. Susan B. Glasser reports that after the November 3 election “Milley believed that the nation had come close — ‘very close’ — to conflict with the Islamic Republic.” She writes that Milley’s “running concern” was “the prospect of Trump pushing the nation into a military conflict with Iran.”
Glasser, surely relying at least partly on Milley himself, says the general feared Trump would stage a “Reichstag moment.” In February 1933, Adolf Hitler, the newly installed German Chancellor, used a mysterious fire that destroyed the German Reichstag, or Parliament building, as the pretext to crack down. Hitler, blaming the fire on the German Communist Party with no evidence, suspended civil liberties, including freedom of the press and habeas corpus, banned publications, and jailed thousands of Communists, whose party was technically still legal.
Glasser reports that Milley attended another high-level meeting, this time without Trump, at which his foreign policy advisers again “pushed military action against Iran.” She says that he later asked Vice President Mike Pence why they were so eager to attack Iran. “Because they are evil,” Pence responded.
To her credit, she does, at least briefly, also include Israel’s role in the warmongering. She reminds us that Trump
was close with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was also urging the Administration to act against Iran after it was clear that Trump had lost the election.
It sounds like this kind of White House saber-rattling was an open secret. So why is the mainstream only telling us about the danger now — especially when alternative outlets were printing regular warnings?”
For instance, just a week after the November 3 election, this site ran the following post:
An unhinged Trump could still unleash violence against Iran — but the U.S. media downplay the danger.
Mondoweiss had no sources at high government levels. But we do know how to read — and analyze. An article in that day’s New York Times buried a single chilling sentence in paragraph 8 of its story about how Trump had just fired his Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper:
. . . Defense Department officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries in his waning days in office.
But after that one sentence, the Times dropped the subject, and rattled on about the personnel changes at the Pentagon that might follow Esper’s firing, with all the urgency of a sportswriter covering a trade between two baseball teams.
Six days later, this site did another post. Our headline:
Trump was planning to attack Iran — and the mainstream media missed it until now.
But the mainstream continued sleepwalking though what could have become the worst crisis in many decades, arguably even more dangerous than the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Thomas Friedman, the Mideast expert and twice-weekly Timescolumnist, ignored the war threat entirely, although his high-level contacts in both Washington and Tel Aviv must have told him about it.
The cable news networks barely said a word. We haven’t pored over the transcripts of Rachel Maddow’s show, for instance, but we don’t remember that she spent any time on the danger.
Why did the U.S. mainstream fail so badly — especially as it is clear in retrospect that military insiders, probably including General Milley himself, were leaking away? The clubby groupthink atmosphere among the Washington press corps is surely part of the explanation. The chronic reluctance to report on Israel’s efforts to instigate an American attack is another.
Whatever the reason, the mainstream failure is yet another reminder that you often have to turn to alternative media to learn important truths.
All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.
YOU ARE FREE TO REPRODUCE THIS ARTICLE PROVIDED YOU GIVE PROPER CREDIT TO THE GREANVILLE POST
VIA A BACK LIVE LINK.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]
Don’t forget to sign up for our FREE bulletin. Get The Greanville Post in your mailbox every few days.