Pentagon Chief Again Threatens to Attack Iran

Insists Deal No Obstacle to Unilateral US Strike

Heading to Israel today, Defense Secretary Ash Carter once again talked up the idea of the US, having reached a nuclear deal with Iran, just up and attacking Iran out of nowhere, saying that’s one of the best things about the nuclear deal.

One of the reasons this deal is a good one is that it does nothing to prevent the military option,” Carter insisted, saying the US and Israel could “agree to disagree” about the merits of the plan, but that the planning for an aggressive war against Iran would continue.

Carter’s comments were largely the same as the ones he made Tuesday, the day the nuclear deal was reached. He insisted then that the US has tens of thousands of soldiers in the region and would keep moving military assets along the Iranian frontier to facilitate a future strike.

Carter’s comments are seen, at least in part, as trying to placate Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, whose objections seem to center around the pact getting in the way of his decades of agitating for war against Iran. It does, however, add to international mistrust of the US in the wake of the deal, and whether they’re going to either renege on the pact or launch a unilateral war out of nowhere for no reason at all.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.