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For all Team-Trumps tough talk on Iran and its repetition of the lie that Iran is No. 1 in terrorism the chances for a major escalation of tensions remain low, reports Gareth Porter for Middle East Eye.

By Gareth Porter

The first public pronouncements by President Donald Trumps administration on Iran have created the widespread impression that the U.S. will adopt a much more aggressive posture towards the Islamic Republic than under Barack Obamas presidency. But despite the rather crude warnings to Tehran bynow ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynnand by Trump himself, the Iran policy that has begun to take shape in the administrations first weeks looks quite similar to Obamas.

The reason is that the Obama administrations policy on Iran reflected the views of a national security team that adhered to an equally hardline stance as those of the Trump administration.

Flynndeclaredon Feb. 1 that the Obama administration had failed to respond adequately to Tehrans malign actions and suggested that things would be different under Trump. But that rhetoric was misleading, both with regard to the Obama administrations policy toward Iran and on the options available to Trump going beyond that policy.

The idea that Obama had somehow become chummy with Iran doesnt reflect the reality of the former administrations doctrine on Iran. The Obama nuclear deal with Iran angered right-wing extremists, but his nuclear diplomacy wasbased on trying to coerce Iranto give up as much of its nuclear program as possible through various forms of pressure, including cyber-attacks, economic sanctions and the threat of a possible Israeli attack.

Despite Trumps rhetoric about how bad the nuclear deal was, he has already decided that his administration will not tear up or sabotage the agreement with Iran, a fact made clear by senior administration officials who briefed the media on the same day as Flynns on notice outburst.Trumps team has learned that neither Israel, nor Saudi Arabia wish that to happen.

On the larger issues of Irans influence in the Middle East, Obamas policy largely reflected the views of the permanent national security state, which has regarded Iran as an implacable enemy for decades, ever since the CIA and the U.S. military were at war with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Shia militias in the Strait of Hormuz and Beirut in the 1980s.

The antagonism that the Trump team has expressed toward Irans regional role is no different from what had been said by the Obama administration for years. Secretary of Defense James Mattis hasreferred to Irans malign influenceand called Iran the biggest destabilizing force in the region. ButObamaand hisnational security advisersalso had talked incessantly about Irans destabilizing activities.

In 2015, the Obama administration was using phrases like malign influence and malign activities so often that it wassaid to have become Washingtons latest buzzword.

Different Presidents, Same Policies

Beginning with President Bill Clinton, every administration has accused Iran of being the worlds biggest state sponsor of terrorism, not on the basis of any evidence but as a settled principle of U.S. policy. Starting with the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the Clinton administration blamed Iran for every terrorist attack in the world even before any investigation had begun.

As I discovered from extended investigations into both theBuenos Aires terror bombingof 1994 and theKhobar Towers bombingof 1996, the supposed evidence of Iranian involvement was either nonexistent or clearly tainted. But neither reality inhibited the continued narrative of Iran as a terrorist state.

Some Trump advisersreportedlyhave been discussing a possible presidential directive to the State Department to consider designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization. But such a move would fall under the category of political grandstanding rather than serious policy. The IRGC is already subject to sanctions under at least three different U.S. sanctions programs, as legal expert Tyler Culishas pointed out.

Furthermore, the Quds Force, the arm of the IRGC involved in operations outside Iran, has been designated as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist for nearly a decade. About the only thing the proposed designation might accomplish is to allow the United States to punish Iraqi officials with whom the Quds Force has been cooperating against the Islamic State group.

The Trump team has indicated its intention to give strong support to Saudi Arabias regional anti-Iran policy. But it is now apparent that Trump is not inclined to do anything more militarily against the Assad regime than Obama was. And on Yemen, the new administration is not planning to do anything that Obama did not already do.

When asked whether the administration was reassessing the Saudi war in Yemen, a senior officialgave a one-word answer: No. That indicates that Trump will continue the Obama administration policy of underwriting the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen providing aerial refueling, bombs and political-diplomatic support which is necessary for Riyadhs war. Both Obama and Trump administrations thus appear to share responsibility for the massive and deliberately indiscriminate bombing of Houthi-controlled cities as well as for the existing and incipient starvation of2.2 million Yemeni children.

As for Irans missile program, there is no discernible difference between the two administrations. On Feb. 3,Trump officials calledIrans late January missile test destabilizing and provocative. The Obama administration and its European allies had issued astatement in March 2016calling Iranian missile tests destabilizing and provocative.

Trump has imposed sanctions for Irans alleged violation of the 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution despite the fact that the resolution used non-binding language and that Irans missiles were not designed to carry nuclear weapons. The Obama administrationimposed sanctionsfor Irans allegedly violating a 2005 Bush administration executive order.

Use of Force Unlikely

However, one may object that this comparison covers only the preliminary outlines of Trumps policy towards Iran, and argue that Washington is planning to step up military pressures, including the possible use of force.

It is true that the possibility of a much more aggressive military policy from the Trump administration cannot be completely ruled out, but any policy proposal involving the threat or use of force would have to be approved by the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that is very unlikely to happen.

The last time the U.S. contemplated a military confrontation with Iran was in the George W. Bush administration. In 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed that the U.S. attack bases in Iran within the context of the Iranian involvement in the Iraq War against U.S. troops. But Secretary of Defense Robert M Gates, supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,headed off the effortby insisting that Cheney explain how the process of escalation would end.

There was a very good reason why the plan didnt pass muster with the Pentagon and the JCS. The time when the U.S. could attack Iran with impunity had already passed. In 2007, any attack on Iran would have risked the loss of much of the U.S. fleet in the Gulf to Iranian anti-ship missiles. Today, the cost to the U.S. military would be far higher, because of the greater capability of Iran to retaliate with missiles and conventional payloads against U.S. bases in Qatar and Bahrain.

In the end, the main contours of U.S. policy toward Iran have always reflected the views and the interests of the permanent national security state far more than the ideas of the president. That fact has ensured unending U.S. hostility toward Iran, but it also very likely means continuity rather than radical shifts in policy under Trump.

Gareth Porteris an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly publishedManufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. [This article first appeared at Middle East Eye.]

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More Bluster and Bluff on Iran - Consortium News

Foreign Policy (blog)

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Trump's Iran Policy Is Missing One Big Piece - Foreign Policy (blog)

Since President Trump's election, American allies and other foreign policy observers have been curious to know how the new White House intends to resolve an apparent contradiction. How is it possible that Trump seems keen to make some sort of deal with Vladimir Putin while expressing belligerent contempt for Russia's key Middle East ally, Iran? There may be an answer: Recent press reports indicate the Trump team will try to lure Russia away from Iran. The chances for success are slim.

Moscow and Tehran's alliance was cemented in Syria, where both have historically backed the Assad regime, first Hafez al-Assad and later his son Bashar. Both have supported Bashar al-Assad against an array of opposition forces since the Syrian conflict erupted in the summer of 2011. Four years later, with Assad and Iranian forces in danger of losing the war, Qassem Suleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's expeditionary Quds Force unit, visited Moscow to beg the Russians for more help. Putin consented. He escalated Russia's position in Syria with men and materiel, and marked it with naval installations and airstrips. Ever since, Russian planes have flown in support of Iranian, Hezbollah, and other Iranian-backed ground forces. Rumors regarding points of conflict between Russia and Iran continue to circulate, but this is not, as many have called it, a "marriage of convenience," but a strategic alliance in which each actor depends on the other.

The notion that it is possible to separate Moscow from Tehran is apparently based on two historical precedents. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was intelligence chief for Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq during the surge. Coalition forces were able to ensure relative stability in Iraq as the Sunni tribes were induced to turn their weapons on foreign fighters they had previously aligned with to battle coalition troops.

The second precedent is Egyptian president Anwar Sadat's decision after the October 1973 war with Israel to leave the Soviet fold and ally with the United States. Sadat's move proved such a boon to America's Cold War efforts against Moscow that American policymakers tried to get other Soviet clients to jump, chief among them Syria's Hafez al-Assad, who nonetheless clung to Moscow.

Even after the Cold War, American diplomats continued their efforts in the Levant by courting Hafez's son Bashar, to see if he'd abandon his patrons in Tehran. Bashar never had any intention of jumping; he had simply learned from his father that dangling possibilities in front of American diplomats brings them to the table with incentives and promises, all of which you can pocket to enhance your own prestige without giving the Americans a thing.

What two generations of American policymakers who dealt with the Assad family seem to have missed is that Sadat came to his decision on his own. The Soviets were bad for Egypt, Sadat believed, and the Americans and their money were the future. The same was true three decades later of Iraq's Sunni tribes, which concluded that al Qaeda and the foreign fighters who occupied Iraq to fight the Americans were a dead end. Better to work with U.S. forces to get rid of them. Both Sadat and the Iraqi tribes were, in the parlance of the intelligence world, walk-ins who volunteered to change sides. Washington added various incentives to facilitate decisions that greatly benefited the United States, but there was little even the subtlest and most creative diplomats, policymakers, or dealmakers could have offered had the tribes and Sadat not already shown signs they were looking to jump.

Now, it's certainly possible that the Russians are privately sending messages to the Trump administration that they're willing to entertain a deal to abandon the Iranians. But it's highly unlikely. The Russia-Iran alliance is a strategic relationship in the most fundamental way.

When Vladimir Putin surveys the Middle East, he sees a post-1973 landscape, what the Middle East looked like after Sadat embraced the United States. The region is covered with American allies, from Israel to Egypt, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Sure, Barack Obama put American allies in a hard spot by forsaking them all, creating a vacuum filled by Moscow, where traditional U.S. regional partners were compelled to petition Putin on bended knee. But eight years is a relatively short period compared to the decades during which Washington established strategic relationships in the region, through arms deals and security arrangements and economic and cultural exchanges. When Putin looks at the region, he sees only one empty space on the boardIran. There is simply no way for the Russians to project power or manage their regional interests without Iran and its partners, like Hezbollah. Asking Putin to abandon the Iranians is like asking him to leave the Middle East.

And that's the kind of deal the Trump administration should be angling for in the region. The United States doesn't want Putin on NATO's Turkish border. It doesn't want Russia sending missiles to Syria, as it did last week. The White House doesn't want Russia compromising Israel's air superiority in the eastern Mediterranean, and it surely doesn't want Russia backing Hezbollah and Iran's approach to Israel's Golan Heights border. So how do you get to yes?

You don't have to be an artist of the deal to know that starting talks with the premise that you want to make the other players at the table happy puts you on course to losing your shirt. You surely don't concede up front that Putin gets to keep his naval base in Tartus, for instance, or that Russia gets to carve out a mini-statelet for Syria's Alawite community.

No, you start by not speaking directly with Russia at all. You negotiate with Putin by targeting Iran, through a variety of measures, including sanctions, clandestine operations, cyberwar, and a snare ready everywhere Tehran is likely to misbehave: the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, eastern Mediterranean, etc. And indeed, Flynn and the staff he's put together at the National Security Council are eager to put Iranians back in the box that Obama let them out of.

In other words, the way to persuade Putin to abandon Iran is by showing him that it's a bad investment, that his position in the region, which is based entirely on his partnership with an Iran that is growing in power and prestige, has been pulled out from under him, like a Persian carpet. Why keep throwing good money after bad?

It's a risky gambit, which is perhaps why the Trump administration is floating rumors of trying to "talk" Putin out of his alliance with Iran, even as it seeks to target his allies. The other choice, however, is much riskier: to acquiesce to Obama's vision of the region, where American allies and interests are at risk, and American adversaries are on the rise.

Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

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Trump Won't Be Able to Talk Putin Out of His Alliance with Iran - The Weekly Standard

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Irans hard-line Islamic regime has escalated its overseas terrorist operations, establishing a network of over a dozen internal training camps for foreign fighters, the regimes largest resistance group said at a press conference on Tuesday in Washington.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran issued its intelligence report specifying the camps locations and the countries represented.

The councils largest member is the Peoples Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK). It boasts an extensive spy network inside the mullah-run government, including the all-powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its special forces wing, the Quds force, and has a track record of exposing clandestine parts of the Iranian national security apparatus.

The Quds force played a significant role in the Iraq War by training Iraqi Shiites on how to make bombs that killed scores of American troops. The Quds force is now directing thousands of Iraqi Shiite militia members in Iraq, some of whom have gone to Syria to fight for the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The U.S. calls Iran the worlds No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. However, neither the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps nor the Quds force is on the State Departments list of designated terrorist organizations. The Treasury Department in 2007 designated the Quds force as a material supporter of terrorism, but National Council of Resistance of Iran officials say the U.S. government should go much further.

The Iranian resistance has emphasized on countless occasions that the source and the epicenter of terrorism, fundamentalism and regional meddling is the fundamentalist regime ruling Iran, said Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the councils Washington office.

The council said Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has approved a directorate inside the Quds force in order to expand its training of foreign mercenaries as part of the regimes strategy to step up its meddling abroad, including in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The camps have been divided based on the nationality of the trainees and the type of training, the council said. Both terrorist training and also military training for militias are provided, enabling them to better infiltrate and advance the regimes regional objectives.

Every month, hundreds of forces from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Lebanon countries where the regime is involved in front-line combat receive military training and are subsequently dispatched to wage terrorism and war, the statement said.

In Lebanon, Iran supports, arms and finances Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that is also fighting for Mr. Assad in Syria.

Beyond the Middle East

Some Quds graduates have shown up outside the region and on the U.S. doorstep in Latin America.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly testified before Congress, when he commanded U.S. Southern Command as a Marine Corps general, that Hezbollah operatives had arrived in South America and that Iran had opened scores of Islamic centers there.

Critics of the Obama administrations negotiated nuclear deal with Iran, which freed up billions of dollars in frozen assets, say the concessions have failed to temper Tehrans bellicosity or its desire to exert hegemony over the Persian Gulf region.

The councils report says the Quds force oversees 14 training bases from operation headquarters at the sprawling Imam Ali air base. The commander reports directly to the Quds commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who has been directing operations in Iraq and in Syria.

The largest number of enlistees at Imam Ali are from Syria. They learn how to fire heavy weapons and missiles and to operate drones.

The council listed what it said were the locations and secret code numbers for other camps that conduct training in urban warfare, such as riding motorcycles in terrorist attacks. The councils report, using satellite imagery, locates each camp on a map of Iran.

The Shahriar Garrison in southwest Tehran, for example, specializes in training Afghan mercenaries, who are then sent to Syria.

At the press briefing, Mr. Jafarzadeh, the council official, called on the Trump administration to add the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds force to the State Departments terrorist list.

The IRGC is the backbone of the apparatus established to preserve the dictatorship, which itself rests on three pillars, he said. The first is suppression within Iran. The second is export of terrorism and fundamentalism beyond Irans borders. And the third is the program to manufacture a nuclear bomb and nuclear-capable missiles to threaten other countries.

MEK was once on the State Departments terrorist list, for attacks it was accused of carrying out in the 1970s and 1980s, first against the government of the shah of Iran and later against the clerics who overthrew him and now dominate the regime in Tehran. The group fought a long, battle to get the designation lifted, and the Obama administration delisted MEK in 2012 after attesting that it had not been involved in terrorism for over a decade.

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Iran growing network to train foreign terrorists, dissident group says - Washington Times