Donald Trump<\/a> but of the allies he has helped bring together in recent months, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.<\/p>\nEvidently it would take more than individual murders to induce Iran to risk responses justifying a large-scale air attack before Trump leaves office. But US military and covert planning staffs are up to the task of attempting to meet that challenge, on schedule.<\/p>\n
I was a participant-observer of such planning myself, with respect to Vietnam half a century ago. On 3 September 1964 \u2013 just a month after I had become special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John T McNaughton \u2013 a memo came across my desk in the Pentagon written by my boss. He was recommending actions \u201clikely at some point toprovoke a military DRV [North Vietnam] response \u2026 likely to provide good grounds for us to escalate if we wished\u201d.<\/p>\n
Such actions \u201cthat would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction\u201d (sic), as spelled out five days later by McNaughton\u2019s counterpart at the state department, the assistant secretary of state William Bundy, might include \u201crunning US naval patrols increasingly close to the North Vietnamese coast\u201d \u2013 ie running them within the 12-mile coastal waters the North Vietnamese claimed: as close to the beach as necessary, to get a response that might justify what McNaughton called \u201ca full-fledged squeeze on North Vietnam [a progressively all-out bombing campaign]\u201d, which would follow \u201cespecially if a US ship were sunk\u201d.<\/p>\n
I have little doubt that such contingency planning, directed by the Oval Office, for provoking, if necessary, an excuse for attacking Iran while this administration is still in office exists right now, in safes and computers in the Pentagon, CIA and the White House. That means there are officials in those agencies \u2013 perhaps one sitting at my old desk in the Pentagon \u2013 who have seen on their secure computer screens highly classified recommendations exactly like the McNaughton and Bundy memos that came across my desk in September 1964.<\/p>\n
I regret I did not copy and convey those memos to the foreign relations committee in 1964, rather than five years later.<\/p>\n
I will always regret that I did not copy and convey those memos \u2013 along with many other files in the top-secret safe in my office at that time, all giving the lie to the president\u2019s false campaign promises that same fall that \u201cwe seek no wider war\u201d \u2013 to Senator Fulbright\u2019s foreign relations committee in September 1964 rather than five years later in 1969, or to the press in 1971. A war\u2019s worth of lives might have been saved.<\/p>\n
Current documents or digital files that contemplate provoking or \u201cretaliating to\u201d Iranian actions covertly provoked by us should not remain secret another moment from the US Congress and the American public, lest we be presented with a disastrous fait accompli<\/em> before January 20, instigating a war potentially worse than Vietnam plus all the wars of the Middle East combined. It is neither too late for such plans to be carried out by this deranged president nor for an informed public and Congress to block him from doing so.<\/p>\nI am urging courageous whistleblowing today, this week, not months or years from now, after bombs have begun falling. It could be the most patriotic act of a lifetime.<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump\u2019s incitement of criminal mob violence and occupation of the Capitol makes clear there is no limitation whatever on the abuse of power he may commit in\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6364"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6365,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6364\/revisions\/6365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}