Trump's top national security adviser John Bolton made a spectacle of it when he announced that a carrier strike group and bombers would be deployed to the region to counter specific threats from Iranian-backed forces, but if you've been at least semi-conscious for the past 20 years you know we can't take what Bolton says at face value.
Sources who spoke to the Daily Beast say the White House has overreacted and exaggerated the threat.
Justifying the move, anonymous government officials cited intelligence indicating Iran had crafted plans to use proxies to strike U.S. forces, both off the coast of Yemen and stationed in Iraq. National Security Adviser John Bolton also discussed the intelligence on the record. A consensus appeared to be emerging: that Iran was gearing up for war.
But multiple sources close to the situation told The Daily Beast that the administration blew it out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.
“It’s not that the administration is mischaracterizing the intelligence, so much as overreacting to it,” said one U.S. government official briefed on it.
Another source familiar with the situation agreed that the Trump administration’s response was an “overreaction” but didn’t dispute that a threat exists.
The idea that Iran is gearing up to start a war with the United States is so hilariously preposterous it could only emerge from the fever dreams of John Bolton.
It seems more plausible to me that Iran is gearing up to defend itself against John Bolton and Donald Trump and their efforts to prepare for that have been intentionally mischaracterized as an offensive threat rather than defensive posturing.
I'm obviously not an intelligence analyst, but it's not like we haven't seen this movie before. Iran does not pose a serious threat to the United States and neither did Iraq.
I will consider it a minor miracle if we rid ourselves of Trump before he starts a war somewhere.