CommonDreams.org summarizes recent developments on Iran in “‘Disturbing’: Trump Reportedly Reviewed Bolton Plan to Threaten Iran by Sending 120,000 Troops to Middle East“: “According to the New York Times, the military plan was crafted by national security adviser John Bolton — who has repeatedly expressed support for bombing Iran, including in the pages of the Times — and presented to the president last Thursday by Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who Trump nominated last week to serve as permanent Pentagon chief. …
“According to the Times, U.S. officials believe — without citing any evidence — that Iran was involved in reported attacks on UAE and Saudi oil tankers in the Persian Gulf over the weekend.”
GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com, @GarethPorter
Available for a limited number of interviews, Porter is a noted independent investigative journalist and author of the book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He recently wrote the piece “Bolton Is Spinning Israeli ‘Intelligence’ to Push for War Against Iran.”
He said today: “We are in grave danger of being sleepwalked into military confrontation with Iran over an incident that is blamed wrongly on Iran. Corporate media have given Bolton and his conniving to achieve such a crisis a free pass, and now Director of National Intelligence has lent the intelligence community’s support to Bolton’s scheme by suggesting Iran is suspected in the oil tanker incidents, in the absence of any evidence.” Earlier this year, Porter wrote the piece “The Right May Finally Get Its War on Iran.”
SIMIN ROYANIAN, ciwhr at yahoo.com
Royanian blogs at CassandraSpeaksBlog.wordpress.
PAUL PILLAR, prp8 at georgetown.edu
Pillar was an analyst at the CIA for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. Recently, LobeLog published his piece “Bolton’s War.”
DAN KOVALIK, DKovalik at usw.org, @danielmkovalik
Kovalik is author of the book The Plot to Attack Iran (2018, from Simon & Schuster). He said today: “A war with Iran would be unconscionable. Iran, which helped the U.S. in the fight against terror after 9/11, is no threat to us. The biggest threat to our nation and the world is in fact the warmongers currently running the White House.”