zlacker

>>option+(OP)
The State Department does not have the credibility to make statements like this right now.

>>bredre+U
I know how fashionable it is to shit on the USA, at least for another week. But you are implying the CCP does have credibility in their claims this is not true?

What advantage do you think the state dept has to put this out if it is not true? The new admin can walk it back in 1/2 a second if that’s the case.

>>SV_Bub+R2
Note that Pompeo is also alleging a link between Iran and al-Qaeda (see the https://www.state.gov home page, for instance), which is another "extraordinary claim" - nobody has been seriously worried about al-Qaeda in a long while, and Iran has not been historically aligned with them.

If Pompeo is running for president in 2024, a war with Iran will benefit him in much the same way the war with Iraq (which was based on untrue claims) benefited Bush. It's in his interest (both in the sense of a personal interest and in the sense of consistent with his neoconservative / hawkish beliefs, which are much stronger than Trump's) to sour the relationship with Iran and also to prepare the American people for the idea that we should be going to war with them.

>>geofft+a5
> If Pompeo is running for president in 2024, a war with Iran will benefit him in much the same way the war with Iraq (which was based on untrue claims) benefited Bush.

Was the war Dick Cheney started going years before Bush announced he was running? How would this be comparable at all to Bush/Iraq?

>>SV_Bub+Z5
Cheney was Secretary of Defense during the first Iraq war, under the elder Bush: https://history.defense.gov/Multimedia/Biographies/Article-V...

> After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cheney worried about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and effective control of nuclear weapons from the Soviet nuclear arsenal that had come under the control of newly independent republics-Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan-as well as in Russia itself. Cheney warned about the possibility that other nations, such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, would acquire nuclear components after the Soviet collapse.

and later in that biography:

> A draft Defense Planning Guidance issued early in 1992 envisioned several scenarios in which the United States might have to fight two large regional wars at one time–for example, against Iraq again, against North Korea, or in Europe against a resurgent, expansionist Russia.

Come Cheney's vice presidency, there was all of a sudden talk about an "axis of evil" - Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Anyway, obviously Pompeo hasn't announced, but there is widespread speculation based on concrete actions by him - see e.g. https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-12-09/mi... - so I don't think it's unreasonable for me to say "If Pompeo is running."

And the most direct way it would be comparable to Bush/Iraq is that it would falsely allege that al-Qaeda is linked to the government of a Middle Eastern country and use it as an excuse for regime change in that country.