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ScheerPost Staff
War planners in Washington once spent months gaming out how a U.S. strike on Iran would ignite the region. This time, it took a whim, a whisper campaign, and a president surrounded by fanatics to plunge the Middle East into a catastrophe every previous administration—Republican and Democrat—had refused to unleash. In this week’s The World This Week, Consortium News editor‑in‑chief Joe Lauria sits down with former CIA officer and torture‑program whistleblower John Kiriakou to dissect a war launched with no preparation, no diplomacy, no strategy, and no understanding of the country the U.S. has now attacked.
Kiriakou, who watched the Iraq invasion unfold from inside the CIA, describes a White House that ignored its own analysts, sidelined diplomats, and convinced itself—under the influence of Benjamin Netanyahu, Marco Rubio, and a religious zealot running the Pentagon—that Iran would “collapse like a house of cards.” Instead, the U.S. has triggered exactly the nightmare scenario its own war games predicted for decades: regional bases under fire, Gulf monarchies distancing themselves from Washington, and an Iranian state far more unified and battle‑hardened than the neocons ever imagined.
As Kiriakou puts it, this isn’t just reckless policy. It’s the return of the same delusional thinking that produced Iraq—only this time, the target is a nation the size of Western Europe, with 92 million people, forbidding terrain, and a long memory of resisting foreign invasion. And unlike 2003, the U.S. didn’t even bother to pretend: no coalition, no diplomacy, no public case, no preparation. Just a president who, according to rumors inside the White House, was told by Netanyahu that Israel might use nuclear weapons if he didn’t act—and who may have had his own reasons for wanting to “normalize” their use.
This conversation is a indictment of a government run by amateurs, ideologues, and blackmail‑artists, and a press corps too timid—or too complicit—to say so. It’s also a warning: history is repeating itself, but this time the stakes are far higher.
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