Is war with Iran a price Trump is willing to pay to buy the silence of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo?

Mark Sumner

Daily Kos Staff

We have a chicken-and-egg problem. Only in this case, the chicken is Trump’s desire to wag the dog to distract attention from his impeachment by ramping up hostilities in the Middle East. The egg is … interesting. The egg is the long-standing desire of two of those most entangled in the Ukraine scandal to launch a war with Iran. This time, we know the egg came first.

Both former national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are deeply involved in Trump’s efforts to extort political favors from Ukraine—so much so that Bolton is one of the four men sought by Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a witness for the Senate trial.

As the scandal unfolded, it was Bolton who was the boss of both Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Dr. Fiona Hill. He was there for the meetings in which Ambassador Gordon Sondland made clear the connections between Trump’s demands and assistance to Ukraine. It was Bolton who both sent Vindman to see the National Security Council lead attorney and described events in Ukraine as a “drug deal.”

Meanwhile, it was Mike Pompeo who was the actual boss of not just Sondland but also Ambassador Kurt Volker—two out of “three amigos.” It was Pompeo who stood aside when Rudy Giuliani smeared Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. It was Pompeo who turned a deaf ear to warnings from Ambassador William Taylor. It was Pompeo who repeatedly undermined his own department to support the extortion scheme.

Truthful testimony from either man is the one thing that could easily turn Trump’s Senate hearing from a test of how quickly Mitch McConnell can fling down a gavel to a genuine threat of removal from office. In fact, either Bolton or Pompeo could call a press conference at any time and utterly sink Trump by simply filling in the very narrow blanks in what the public already knows about Trump’s Ukraine scheme. That means that they, along with acting chief of staff and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, have tremendous power over Trump.

Bolton and Pompeo have long agreed on one thing: They want a war with Iran. In giving them that war, was Trump reaching for the only distraction he knew would be big enough to keep anyone from looking too closely at the ever-strengthening case for his removal, or was everything that’s happened in Iraq over the last week the payoff for the silence of men who have Trump under their thumb? Was it both?

As The Washington Post pointed out on Monday, Pompeo has been beating the war drum on Iran for years, and he was still beating that drum even as Trump prepared to let the missiles fly. Pompeo had already pushed for Trump to launch attacks against Iran and Shiite militia groups in the summer of 2019, following the downing of a U.S. drone. That time it didn’t work.

But this time Trump was willing to launch a war because a single contractor had been killed. That’s despite the fact that there are an unknown number of contractors in Iraq and at least 1,569 had been killed prior to the death on Dec. 27. Despite the fact that there are thousands of contractors still in Iraq, a fact that’s often used to disguise the real scale of ongoing U.S. involvement when officials talk about “only 5,000” military personnel. 

What made this contractor the last straw? What could possibly have happened in the last six months of 2019 that made Trump so much more willing to go into a conflict with Iran? Well … impeachment happened. The testimony of multiple witnesses describing Trump’s scheme and his use of Rudy Giuliani to drive a campaign of corruption. That happened. 

More recently, what happened is that a number of emails appeared showing that Trump was continuously involved in withholding assistance to Ukraine. In fact, sources have made some of this information available in an unredacted form that makes it clear that Trump acted directly and repeatedly, over objections that what he was doing violated laws concerning the distribution of congressionally approved funding.

There’s no doubt that Trump needed a distraction. Based on Trump’s willingness to engage in similar distractions in the past, and the fact that his Twitter account is littered with many, many pieces of evidence that Trump believed starting a war with Iran would be a boost for a politician seeking re-election, there may not be a need for any other reason—if it can be called reason—for his actions.

Except … Bolton and Pompeo. It’s quite a damned coincidence that the people in a position to squeeze Trump got just what they wanted, just at the moment that best serves Trump.

Trump’s stated reasons for launching a series of attacks against Shiite militia bases in Iraq and Syria was that an American contractor had been killed and four American soldiers injured. Injured “badly,” according to Trump. However, two days after the event, all four of the soldiers were back on duty, and two weeks later the public knows absolutely nothing about the contractor. It might be understandable that a name wasn’t released … but who was this person? Were they a doctor providing flu shots to Iraqi kids? Were they a planner helping with the local water supply? Or were they a Blackwater mercenary on site as “security”? It seems more than just odd that we don’t have that answer. That we, in fact, know almost nothing about the attack which supposedly formed the raison d'être for everything that has happened over the last two weeks.

Trump’s stated reason for killing Iranian general Soleimani was an “imminent threat” generated by a plan in progress. Except, said Trump, “we caught him.” But that idea seemed little short of ludicrous from the beginning, and as Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi made clear over the last two days, the “imminent threat” idea didn’t fit with either what Trump was telling him or what was actually happening on the ground in Iraq, where Soleimani seemed to be part of negotiations to actively de-escalate the cycle Trump fueled with the air strikes on Dec. 29. Faced with Abdul-Mahdi’s statements, even Pompeo seems to have dropped the idea that the strike against Soleimani thwarted some immediate threat, falling back on multiple variations of the idea that the general was simply a bad guy who had done bad things in the past and deserved to be killed.

The excuses Trump has made for his actions don’t begin to hold water. But there are more genuine reasons for bringing the world to the brink of war than just a distraction.

So which came first? Was it wagging the dog, or silencing the witnesses?