Is Iran going Iraq’s way?

The stage is set and preparations are underway. The Middle East is getting dragged into another major warfare. Now that Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan are fallen, Iran apparently comes next in the domino.

But unlike Iraq or Syria, Iran has a strong defense mechanism along with its solid connection with some influential local rebel groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis.

A war with Iran will be way more dangerous than the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. But the trumpet of war is roaring everywhere from Pentagon to Riyadh.

The United States, Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have been campaigning against Iran ever since the Houthi rebels of Yemen launched attacks on the Saudi oil facilities.

The post-attack situation has been unfolding in the same way that led the US to attack Iraq in 2003.

Despite the official Houthi statement, taking responsibilities for drone attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, the Kingdom annulled Houthis' claims and accused Iran instead—escalating the geopolitical tension in the Middle East rapidly.

The Trump administration was quick in responding to the Houthi attacks in the Saudi oil fields. Pentagon announced to send additional US troops and missile defense equipment to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

An administration, so reluctant to save the Yemeni people in the face of misery due to Saudi aggression, came in defense of Saudi Arabia proactively in a way that almost justifies this headline of Onion, a satirical US digital media outlet, that reads- "John Bolton: 'An Attack On Two Saudi Oil Tankers Is An Attack On All Americans'."

So far, more than 70,000 people have been killed and thousands more are at risk of getting killed in the civil war in Yemen, orchestrated by Saudi Arabia to save the ruling regime.

But despite "a growing sense (in the Capitol Hill) that the Saudi air campaign is pointless, serving only to turn an already impoverished country into a humanitarian disaster zone," as BBC's Jonathan Marcus writes, Trump Administration continued its support for the Saudis.

Now, instead of stopping a soaring humanitarian disaster in Yemen, the Trump administration is apparently rooting for a new war in the Middle East. 

Interestingly enough, Donald Trump once tweeted that attacking Iran would get his predecessor Barack Obama re-elected. Having this kind of mental framework, the US President's motives, just months before the presidential election, are understandable.

In an apparent bid to boost the morale of the White House's campaign against Tehran, the UK prime minister Boris Johnson also announced to take part in the US-led military effort to help Saudi Arabia, after holding Tehran responsible for the attacks on the oil fields.

The latest rhetoric from the US, Israeli, Saudi, and Iranian politicians resonates the way Iraq came under US attack for allegedly having nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that the US and British officials called an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace.

However, the world later came to know how the failure on the part of the United States intelligence destroyed Iraq, paving the way for fundamentalist groups like Islamic States (IS) to rise.

The Trump administration has accused the Iranian government of a series of recent attacks on a number of tankers in the Gulf, most recently on a pair of Norwegian and Japanese tankers carrying petrochemicals.

In spite of the Japanese government, the direct victim in the tanker crisis, saying the US evidence is not convincing enough to allege Tehran, the White House continued to maximise pressure against Tehran.

The US campaign against Tehran during the Persian-Gulf tanker crisis didn't receive winds at its sails, as none of its western allies except the United Kingdom participated in it. 

But the campaign against Tehran is now receiving winds at its sail after the German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she believed there is strong evidence that Iran was behind the attack in the Saudi oilfields and the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced to send troops in Saudi Arabia.

After Donald Trump fired the war hawk John Bolton, who once wrote a piece on The New York Times titled "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran", it was expected that Iran might have its peace at last. But having Mike Pompeo as foreign secretary, who said that "2000 sorties" would be enough to end Iran's nuclear programs; Iran is apparently a long shot away from peace.

With Mike Pompeo as the foreign secretary, president Trump also has his version of Dick Cheney, to boot; who is capable enough to drag the US to a war against Iran, even if the president does not like it very much.

To enlighten on how Iran could go Iraq's way, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who had served as the chief of staff to Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, recently spoke to The Intercept's Mehdi Hasan about the similarities of the US approach in dealing with the present Iran crisis with that of Iraq in 2003.

"There are so many similarities; it's hard to enumerate them all. The most prominent ones to me, though, are the techniques, the methodologies," said Colonel Wilkerson. Earlier in a take on The New York Times, Wilkerson found it astonishing "how similar the Trump administration's overall methods match those of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney."

The US media also seems to have fallen into the old traps of pre-Iraq invasion periods. The robust approach of media to deescalate the tension between the US and Iran is barely seen. Instead, the media is "providing a sympathetic platform for the administration without fundamentally questioning its premises," writes The Intercept's Mehdi Hasan.

With the United Kingdom shouldering the US stance on Iran, and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel asserting her "belief" on Iran being responsible for the attacks on Saudi oil facilities, the latest deployment of troops in Saudi Arabia with escalating rhetoric of politicians might cost the Middle East a war that will not end in the decades to come.