Last year, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Timesreported on the Iranian students whose valid student visas to study in the U.S. were being revoked at the last minute. Now the same thing is happening to a new group of students, but it is occurring after they have already flown here:

In recent months, however, a growing number of Iranians with valid student visas have been detained upon arrival at US airports by Customs and Border Protection and deported back to Iran. Some of them have been barred from returning to the United States for years.

Since August, at least 10 students have been sent back to Iran upon their arrival at US airports, the Guardian found, the most recent of whom was deported on 3 January. Seven of those 10 students had flown into Logan international airport in Boston, where some of them allege serious infractions by CBP, including multiple complaints about an individual officer.

It was bad enough when the government was slamming the door in the faces of students that had legitimate visas before they boarded their planes, and it is inexcusable to do the same to them after they travel here at enormous expense. Forcing these students to return to Iran imposes a huge burden on them, and it does great harm to their academic careers and future prospects. In many cases, the students who are coming to study here have had to quit jobs at home and sell their property in order to make the journey here, and when they are forced to return they can’t just go back to the lives they had. They are being made to put their lives and careers on hold for no good reason. This is what the Trump administration’s “support” for the Iranian people looks like in practice.

There were reports this evening that the same thing had happened to Shahab Dehghani, an undergraduate economics and math student who was returning to continue his studies at Northeastern University:

Shahab Dehghani is another Iranian student with a valid F1 visa about to be deported. His attorney & a group of his friends are at @BostonLogan protesting right now. @CBP won’t let the Economics student at @Northeastern talk to anyone. Congressman Kennedy called, CBP said no. https://t.co/dlgaSVNcZspic.twitter.com/09k3WXSL30

— Bahman Kalbasi (@BahmanKalbasi) January 20, 2020

Protesters continue to gather at Logan airport in support of Iranian student Shahab Dehghani, who has been unjustly detained by @CBP. Shahab is an undergraduate studying Math and Econ at @Northeastern and holds an F1 visa. pic.twitter.com/13Rs6pX16f

— NIAC (@NIACouncil) January 21, 2020

As I am writing this, it was still unclear whether Mr. Dehghani’s deportation would happen, but if it does it will be one more in a series of outrageous decisions to punish Iranian students solely because of where they come from.

The revocation of so many student visas of Iranian students over the last few months is an ugly by-product of the Trump administration’s reckless Iran policy. It appears that Iranian students are being unfairly subjected to harsher scrutiny simply because of their nationality, and they are being forced to undergo tremendous hardship when they have the rug pulled out from under their feet by arbitrary decisions upon their arrival here. The mistreatment of these students is further proof that the exemption for student visas contained in the travel ban is increasingly meaningless. There is no question that Iranian students are being singled out more than students from any other country:

According to the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans, a not-for-profit advocacy organization, the removal of Iranian students upon their arrival “has increased substantially within the past few months” as political tensions between Washington and Tehran have escalated. “The number of cases we hear about from other communities does not compare to what’s happening to Iranians,” said Ali Rahnama, PAAIA attorney.

The U.S. should be happy to welcome students from Iran to study in our colleges and universities, not least since it is one of the few points of contact between our two countries in the absence of normal diplomatic and trade relations. These are some of the brightest young Iranians who want to be here, and we should want them to be here. All of the reports about these students have mentioned that these students have usually had options to study in other countries, but chose to come to the U.S. Our government thanks them for their enthusiasm by slapping them in the face, mistreating them at the border, and shipping them back to Iran. Once deported, these students won’t have the option to apply immediately for new visas even if they wanted to. Instead, they face a ban of five years:

All of the students denied entry in Boston were officially deported and banned from the US for five years.

Multiple students said CBP gave them records of their questioning that were partly inaccurate or fabricated, while others were put on planes back to Iran without a copy of the paperwork. “I don’t know under which section of the law I was not allowed to enter the US,” Shahkhajeh said.

The infuriating thing about all of this is that it is obviously not related to any real security concerns. Thoroughly vetted students that want to attend our schools are not threats to this country, and they would not have received their visas if there were any legitimate reason to think that they were.

These students have already gone through an extensive process in order to get their visas, but they are still getting hassled when they arrive for no apparent reason:

Several immigration attorneys said they could not make sense of these deportations. “Why should an eight-month visa process be thrown out over a couple questions at the airport?” Rahnama said. “These students already disclosed all their information and went through months and months of security clearance,” he added.

In addition to the repetitive, pointless questioning, the Iranian students reported abusive treatment by CBP officers:

Between rounds of questioning, officers searched the contents of Elmi’s bags and made him unlock his phone and write down the password. Then in another room, they told him to spread his legs and put his hands on the wall. “They started with my legs and worked up,” Elmi said. “They treated me like I was a terrorist.”

Several of the students who were deported from the Boston airport said the screening there was aggressive and in some cases abusive. A student held for questioning at the airport in August while he was en route to Detroit said he was led to a private room with a metal table. “In the room, the officer’s behavior changed. He got aggressive,” said the student, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution in future visa applications. “Tell us the fucking truth!” the student remembers the officer shouting. “I was so scared I was shaking,” the student said. The officer asked him if he was a radical Muslim.

The damage to these students’ lives has already been done, but perhaps by calling attention to this mistreatment and harassment of Iranian students the public can put pressure on Congress to act to prevent it from happening to any more students in the future.

Update: Sahab Dehghani was sent back last night in defiance of a court order:

#BREAKING: 24 yo Shahab Dehghani, an #Iranian citizen w a valid F1 student visa, was removed from the U.S. by @CBP last night, despite an emergency stay issued by a #Boston federal court.

More details from the gov should come out at today’s hearing.https://t.co/5RSpN1zgCE

— Shannon Dooling (@sdooling) January 21, 2020

The New York Timespublished a weird double endorsement of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar last night. Neither candidate benefits much from a half-hearted half-endorsement, and it is in keeping with the confusion of the Times‘ editorial board that after all of the build-up to making “the choice” they ended up refusing to make one. One thing that struck me about the endorsement is how it engaged in irresponsible threat inflation at the same time that it barely paid any attention to the foreign policy views of any of the candidates. For instance, this line stood out as a ridiculous bit of fear-mongering:

The Middle East is more unstable at this moment than at any other time in the past decade, with a nuclear arms race looking more when than if.

Have their editors been asleep for the last decade? This is a sweeping and inaccurate statement that requires us to forget the peak of the war in Syria, ISIS’ control over a swathe of Iraq and Syria, the first several years of the war on Yemen, and the upheavals of the protests at the beginning of the decade. Some parts of the region are more unstable than they were at the start of the decade, and others are arguably more stable than they were just a few years ago. The assumption that a “nuclear arms race” is just a matter of time has nothing to support it. We have heard again and again about a nuclear arms race in the region, but almost no one acknowledges that there has been a nuclear weapons state in the region for half a century without setting off such a race. Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons for decades, and there has not been an arms race yet. Proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region is not inevitable, and it makes no sense to talk about it as if it were.

Since the endorsement brings up a potential “nuclear arms race,” you would think that it would have something to say about their preferred candidates’ views on nonproliferation and arms control, right? Well, you’d be wrong about that. The endorsement makes a passing reference to Warren’s competency on foreign policy issues, but it has virtually nothing to say about the positions she has taken. This is quite the oversight in an endorsement that purports to explain why they think that she would be a good presidential nominee. Foreign policy is where the president has the greatest leeway and can potentially do the most harm. The endorsement doesn’t even mention Warren’s serious proposal for reforming and rebuilding the State Department.

Sen. Klobuchar has made a point to talk about the importance of extending New START (a treaty that she voted to ratify), and like the other candidates she has endorsed rejoining the JCPOA, but that never comes up in their description of her views. She has gone out of her way to talk about the importance of arms control, but you would never know that from the write-up that the editorial board gives her. Their account of Klobuchar’s foreign policy record is very limited, and it includes some odd details that don’t make any sense. For example, they claim that Klobuchar cast votes on military action in Libya and Syria:

In 13 years as a senator, she has sponsored and voted on dozens of national defense measures, including military action in Libya and Syria.

It’s not clear how she could have voted on military action in Libya and Syria since the Senate famously never voted on either one of these. The Senate resolution to authorize the ongoing military intervention in Libya never went anywhere, and its House version was voted down by a wide margin. Klobuchar never cast a vote on that because there was never an opportunity for her to vote on it either way, and she was not one of the resolution’s co-sponsors. There might have been an opportunity to vote on military action in Syria in 2013, but the president called off the strike before Congress could vote because there was so much popular opposition to the proposed attack. There was a Syria authorization resolution introduced in early September 2013, but then it was forgotten because it was no longer needed. It is strange that the editorial board felt that they needed to embellish Klobuchar’s Senate record by claiming votes for her that she could not have cast. They ignore real parts of her record and then make up others, and in the end they tell their audience as little as possible about what she would do as president.

Perhaps the weirdest part of the weird endorsement is that the editorial board doesn’t seem to be very familiar with the foreign policy views of the two senators that they have endorsed.

There is a growing backlash in South Korea against the U.S. ambassador there, and it is fueled in large part by frustration with the administration’s shakedown of Seoul and its mishandling of North Korea:

But unlike Lippert, Harris has repeatedly irked many South Koreans since President Donald Trump sent him here.

After meeting Harris in November, Lee Hye-hoon, then chairwoman of the South Korean parliament’s intelligence committee, said that the ambassador repeated about 20 times Trump’s calls for Seoul to drastically increase its financial contribution to U.S. troop deployment in the South.

Harris is evidently an unpopular messenger, but it is the message from the Trump administration that is the real cause of the friction. The president is simultaneously impeding South Korea’s efforts to pursue their engagement policy with North Korea and demanding that South Korea fork over more money. The shakedown was underscored by a joint op-ed from Pompeo and Esper over the weekend in which the Secretaries of State and Defense made demands for more “contributions.” The fact that they delivered these demands in a Wall Street Journal op-ed rather than communicating directly with the South Korean government shows that they were interested more in satisfying Trump’s vanity and embarrassing Moon publicly than they were in finding a diplomatic solution. Humiliating an ally that already does more than almost any other to provide for its own defense and support U.S. forces is bound to provoke an angry reaction.

The op-ed reflects the administration’s habit of treating allies and other partners like vassals and colonies. TAC contributor Harry Kazianis commented on this when the op-ed was published:

Sorry, #SouthKorea is no deadbeat ally. They pay more for their own defense than most NATO nations. They fought in Vietnam, the Mid East and other places–they did not need to. This oped will come back to haunt @realDonaldTrump admin. #ROK is no colony:https://t.co/Pfz9UCwpJJ

— Harry Kazianis (@GrecianFormula) January 17, 2020

Ambassador Harris is also perceived as dictating terms to South Korea, and that is naturally resented:

Kevin Gray, a professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex in the U.K., tweeted Friday that “Koreans’ reaction to Harris’ mustache is vastly exaggerated.”

He said what did rile South Koreans was Harris’ “imperialistic manner” and efforts to “undermine” South Korean President Moon Jae-in and “dictate” South Korean government policy.

A Monday editorial from the Korea Times said that “the point is not his mustache.”

“South Koreans would not have cared that much about his mustache if he was a ‘normal’ ambassador,” the editorial said.

The backlash against Harris is jut one symptom of the larger problem of the Trump administration’s appallingly bad alliance management. The Washington Postquotes Kazianis on this point in a recent article:

“President Trump fails to understand why America has allies in the first place,” said Harry Kazianis, an Asia specialist at the Center for the National Interest. “He treats allies more like mafia partners in crime who need to kiss up to America for protection.”

The president views alliances as protection rackets, and he is interested only in extracting as much payment from other countries as he can. It is important to understand how this differs from real burden-sharing. The president does not propose that other states take up more of the burden of defending themselves so that the U.S. can do less. As we can see from his willingness to “sell” troops to Saudi Arabia, he has no problem continuing and expanding current U.S. commitments overseas as long as someone is willing to put up the cash. If many South Koreans are now bridling at U.S. demands and going so far as to liken Ambassador Harris to a Japanese occupier, that is probably because the U.S. is making a point of acting like a neo-imperialist power that wants to extract tribute from them.

Martin Indyk realizes that the U.S. doesn’t have many interests at stake in the Middle East after all:

Today, however, with U.S. troops still in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan and tensions high over Iran, Americans remain war-weary. Yet we seem incapable of mustering a consensus or pursuing a consistent policy in the Middle East. And there’s a good reason for that, one that’s been hard for many in the American foreign-policy establishment, including me, to accept: Few vital interests of the U.S. continue to be at stake in the Middle East. The challenge now, both politically and diplomatically, is to draw the necessary conclusions from that stark fact.

It has been clear for a long time that the U.S. has few interests in this region, and the few interests that it has had in the past are less important to the U.S. than they used to be. Advocates of restraint and non-intervention have been shoutingthis from the rooftops for most of the last thirty years, so it is interesting to hear a well-known fixture of the foreign policy establishment reach what seems to be a similar conclusion.

On the closer inspection, however, Indyk isn’t really in favor of disentangling the U.S. from the region. He has realized that the U.S. doesn’t have many interests at stake there, but he can’t let go of conventional assumptions about the intrusive U.S. role. Indyk still insists on seeing Iran’s nuclear program and Tehran’s regional influence as problems for the U.S. to solve:

Curbing Iran’s nuclear aspirations and ambitions for regional dominance will require assiduous American diplomacy, not war.

If the U.S. has so little at stake in the region, why does the U.S. need to preoccupy itself with thwarting Iran? If the U.S. would end the economic war and support the original agreement with Iran, the nuclear issue would once again be under control. The belief that Iran has “nuclear aspirations” that need to be curbed and that it is our responsibility to curb them has helped to create the Iran obsession that has taken us to the brink of war more than once in the last year. Not only is there little evidence to support that belief, but it also fuels hostility towards Iran that gives their government added incentive to reconsider their past commitments to keep their nuclear program peaceful. Iran’s “ambitions for regional dominance” are exaggerated, and no matter what their government’s ambitions might be they do not have the ability to dominate the region. U.S. policy towards Iran is driven by excessive and unfounded fear of Iran as a would-be regional hegemon, and that has led us to the current crisis. The U.S. doesn’t get “sucked back in” to the region, but chooses again and again to interfere in things that don’t matter to our security because our government consistently inflates threats from the region and commits too many U.S. resources and too much manpower to counter the exaggerated threats.

Indyk also cannot break out of the “war on terror” framing that has defined so much of U.S. policy in the region ever since 2001. He repeats the mantra “what starts in the Middle East doesn’t stay in the Middle East,” which effectively serves as a justification for a permanent militarized counter-terrorism mission. The first step in reducing the large U.S. military footprint in the region is to recognize that the threat to the U.S. from terrorism is small and manageable. Addressing that manageable threat does not require open-ended deployments and ceaseless warfare across at least half a dozen countries. The U.S. has few interests in the region, and it arguably faces even fewer real threats.

Prior to the major expansion of America’s military presence in the region beginning in 1990, the U.S. did not have a significant problem with terrorist groups originating in this part of the world. Our government’s heavily militarized response to the 9/11 attacks and to the emergence of other jihadist groups during and after the Iraq war has not led to a reduction in the number of terrorist groups or terrorist attacks. On the contrary, there are more groups active now than ever before, and continued U.S. military involvement guarantees more of the same until we recognize the failure of the “war on terror” and give up on a militarized response that has served mainly to destabilize other countries and to kill many innocent people in the process. That will take a more radical rethinking of U.S. foreign policy overall, and it requires us to face up to the major, costly failure that the “war on terror” has been for more than 18 years.

Indyk’s conclusion that the U.S. should “eschew never-ending wars and grandiose objectives—like pushing Iran out of Syria, overthrowing Iran’s ayatollahs or resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in favor of more limited goals that can be achieved with more modest means” is a good start, but I submit that even his “limited” goals go beyond what U.S. interests require. To get to a “more realistic assessment of our interests,” we need a more sober and accurate assessment of foreign threats, and Indyk’s essay shows us that we still have a long way to go before we get there.

“Treated like a terrorist”: U.S. deports growing number of Iranian students with valid visas from U.S. airports. The Guardianreports on the ongoing mistreatment of Iranian students that are granted visas to come study here and are then barred from entering the country for no apparent reason.

Soleimani’s killing is the apotheosis of American “strategy.” Gil Barndollar observes that assassinating Soleimani is part of an “American “strategy” that, despite decades of effort, thousands of American lives, and trillions of dollars, has achieved next to nothing of worth in the Middle East.”

Hard-line forces in Iran are poised to gain strength. Amir Delshad looks ahead to next month’s parliamentary elections in Iran and expects that hard-liners will emerge victorious.

Tom Friedman’s latest column obviously wasn’t fact-checked before it was published:

And then, a few weeks later, Trump ordered the killing of Suleimani, an action that required him to shift more troops into the region and tell Iraqis that we’re not leaving their territory, even though their Parliament voted to evict us. It also prompted Iran to restart its nuclear weapons program [bold mine-DL], which could well necessitate U.S. military action.

Friedman’s claim that Iran restarted a “nuclear weapons program” is completely false. That isn’t what the Iranian government did, and it is irresponsible to say this when it is clearly untrue. Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and it hasn’t had anything like that for more than sixteen years. The Iranian government took another step in reducing its compliance with the JCPOA in the days following the assassination, but contrary to other misleading headlines their government did not abandon the nuclear deal. Iran has not repudiated its commitment to keep its nuclear program peaceful, and it doesn’t help in reducing tensions to suggest that they have. Trump’s recent actions are reckless and dangerous, but it is wrong to say that those actions have caused Iran to start up a nuclear weapons program. That isn’t the case, and engaging in more threat inflation when tensions are already so high is foolish. Friedman is not the only one to make this blunder, but it is the sort of sloppy mistake we expect from him.

If this were just another error from Friedman, it would be annoying but it wouldn’t matter very much. This has to do with the nature of our debate over Iran policy and the nuclear issue in particular. This matters because there is a great deal of confusion in this country about Iran’s nuclear program that the Trump administration has deliberately encouraged. They have promoted dishonest claims about the JCPOA and made unfounded claims about Iran’s so-called “nuclear ambitions” in order to make it seem as if the Iranian government is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. They have done this to justify their hard-line policies and to lay the groundwork for pursuing regime change and war. Every time that someone repeats false claims about a non-existent “nuclear weapons program” in Iran, it creates unnecessary fear and plays into the administration’s hands. The administration is already working overtime to propagandize the public and scare Americans into supporting aggressive and destructive policies against Iran, and no one should be giving them extra help.

The second part of Friedman’s sentence is also quite dangerous, because it encourages his readers to think that the U.S. would somehow be justified in attacking Iran in the unlikely event that they started developing a nuclear weapon. He suggests that an Iranian nuclear weapons program might “necessitate” military action, but any attack on Iran under those circumstances would be illegal and a war of choice just like the invasion of Iraq that Friedman supported almost 17 years ago. Even when Friedman seems to be skeptical of something that the government has done, he can’t help but indulge in threat inflation and lend support to the idea of preventive war.

The last Democratic presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses covered foreign policy more than usual, but as Van Jackson observed the treatment of the issues was extremely shallow and limited. The debate questions were not very good, and in some cases they framed these issues in the most absurd way possible. The candidates were asked about whether they would be willing to keep U.S. troops in the Middle East, and Blitzer put the question to Bernie Sanders this way:

Sen. Sanders, in the wake of the Iran crisis, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei has again called for all U.S. troops to be pulled out of the Middle East, something you’ve called for, as well. Yet when American troops last left Iraq, ISIS emerged and spread terror across the Middle East and, indeed, around the world. How would you prevent that from happening again?

Blitzer’s loaded question was also divorced from reality since he never saw fit to mention that it is the Iraqi government that wants U.S. troops out of their country because of the flagrant violations of Iraqi sovereignty that have taken place in the last three weeks. Iraqi preferences and sovereignty never came up once in the discussion of whether U.S. forces should remain there. It was simply taken for granted that this is solely an American decision and Iraqi wishes don’t count for anything. One reason why our foreign policy debates are so poor is that almost everyone involved in them internalizes this logic of dominating other countries and dictating terms to them. Ignoring Iraqi sovereignty has unfortunately become a well-established habit in Washington among members of both parties.

There is no shortage of sound arguments against what the administration has done and what it threatens to do. Ted Galen Carpenter criticizes the administration’s bullying of Iraq on the main page:

If Washington refuses to withdraw its forces from Iraq, defying the Baghdad government’s calls to leave, those troops will no longer be guests or allies. They would constitute a hostile army of occupation, however elaborate the rhetorical facade.

Doug Bandow recently called for U.S. withdrawal in accordance with Iraqi wishes:

However, Washington cannot reoccupy Iraq against its government’s and especially its people’s will. The consequences of imposing an American presence, backed by threats of economic sanctions if not military action, are likely to be catastrophic. Two wars with Iraq are enough.

The Trump administration’s neo-imperialist policy of threatening Iraq is crying out for serious, sustained criticism from the press and the Democratic field of candidates. Regrettably, the administration faces little pressure at the moment to change its position. In the absence of significant opposition here in the U.S., the administration will assume that it can get away with trying to compel Iraq to yield. Americans need to stand up and reject Trump’s crude imperialism in Iraq, and they need to hold him and his officials for putting U.S. troops at greater risk with his reckless and illegal actions over the last month.

Rebecca Ingber explains why it matters very much whether there was an “imminent” Iranian attack earlier this month:

The framers gave Congress, not the president, the power to declare war with the understanding that it would slow the rush into conflict. A narrow exception for circumstances in which there is truly no time to go to Congress for a vote makes sense. But the president cannot circumvent Congress simply because he views it as good policy to take action.

After hiding behind the claim that they acted to head off an “imminent” attack, the Trump administration now shrugs and claims that it makes no difference if there was such an attack in the works or not. Of course, as far as the legality of the attack is concerned, it makes all the difference in the world. If there really were an “imminent” attack on U.S. forces, the president would be permitted to order military action to avert it. When there is no evidence at all that such an attack was in the offing, the president is obliged to seek Congressional approval first. The president is not free to shout “self-defense” and then initiate hostilities against another state.

Assassination as a tactic is itself prohibited. Charli Carpenter explains:

First, as a high-ranking official of an actual government, he cannot as easily be cast as a terrorist renegade as nonstate actors like bin Laden. Second, in wartime, a military official such as Suleimani could arguably be lawfully killed but only if an international armed conflict already existed between Iran and the United States. And even then, it would not be legal to single him out as an individual, least of all in a third country not party to the war.

Ingber also makes an important point that the location of the attack compounds the illegality of the strike, because the action was taken on Iraqi soil without their government’s permission:

Iraq, of course, did not itself attack us. A crucial step in determining whether it is necessary to use force on the territory of a state that did not itself attack us — the long-standing U.S. approach, dating to the Caroline incident, increasingly adopted by other states — has been to, first, establish the imminence of a forthcoming attack and then to analyze whether that state is itself unwilling or unable to prevent or stop the attack. The administration has not put forward evidence on either question — and has not even addressed the issue of Iraqi sovereignty.

In short, the president did something illegal by ordering the strike without Congressional approval. It was also illegal because he ordered a prohibited assassination. Finally, it was illegal because he ordered an attack in the territory of another country without that government’s approval. Trump had no authority to do what he did, and he made a mockery of the Constitution and international law by doing it. To top it off, he and his top officials have spent the last two weeks lying about why they did it. We know that the president doesn’t care if what he does is legal, and he doesn’t respect the limits on presidential power contained in the Constitution. The attack that the president ordered two weeks ago was also an attack on the rule of law. The question before us is whether enough of us still care about flagrant presidential lawbreaking to oppose him when he orders illegal attacks.

Earlier today, the State Department’s Twitter account posted an insulting piece of revisionist propaganda that whitewashes the abuses of the Pahlavi monarchy and claims that “Iran has a rich history of human rights from the time of Cyrus up until the 1979 revolution.” I’m not embedding the video here because it is such an absurd piece of propaganda, but it does deserve a few comments. First, this is a ridiculous rewriting of history that tries to portray pre-revolutionary Iran as if it were some sort of egalitarian paradise. The text in the video tells quite a fantastical story:

Before the regime, Iran was a place of peace, of joy, of equality. A land of unlimited potential and endless opportunity for every Iranian.

This is simply hogwash. One might wonder why Iranians overthrew their monarchy if the conditions had been so idyllic. Everyone with even a cursory knowledge of that period understands that the government engaged in extensive repression and torture. This is what the State Department wants to laud as part of a “rich history of human rights”? All of this smacks of a policy that being misinformed by nostalgia at best. It may even be part of an attempt to lay the groundwork for promoting some sort of Pahlavi restoration. The son of the last shah is at the Hudson Institute today cheering on regime change. That seems like more than a coincidence.

The video underscores how cynical and selective the Trump administration’s use of human rights rhetoric is. The current Iranian government is guilty of many human rights abuses, and it is responsible for wrongfully detaining, torturing and killing many of its own citizens. Ignoring the serious abuses that took place under the previous regime doesn’t show respect for the Iranian people or their rights. It undermines legitimate criticism in the present by distorting and misrepresenting the past for ideological reasons. The fact that this propaganda video went out from an official department account shows the extent to which ignorant ideologues are controlling the department’s communications, and it reflects the administration’s shallow and sophomoric understanding of Iran and the country’s history that we have come to expect.

Paul Pillar calls for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq now that they are no longer welcome there, and he chastises the administration for their arrogance in defying the Iraqi government’s wishes:

Iraqi nationalism is the most effective check on Iranian influence on Iraq — if only the United States does not mess up this dynamic with actions that turn that nationalist sentiment against itself. The Bush administration messed up with its invasion in 2003, and the Trump administration has messed up with its lethal attacks on Iraqi militias and its assassination of Qassem Soleimani and a senior Iraqi security figure.

For all these reasons, the U.S. occupation of Iraq should end, and the American troops there should come home.

The Trump administration is very nationalistic in a way that exhibits many of the worst flaws of nationalism: it is arrogant, aggressive, dismissive of the rights of others, and oblivious to the equally strong nationalist views of people in the countries that they seek to bully. When confronted with an Iraqi nationalist backlash in response to the administration’s illegal and unpopular actions, the administration responds with imperialistic threats to punish Iraq for daring to stand up for itself. The smart and legal thing for them to do would be to accept that the Iraqi government doesn’t want us there. Our forces should be withdrawn promptly, and the next administration should then try to repair the relationship that this administration has damaged so severely.

American interventionists have a hard time respecting the sovereignty of other countries, because at some level they do not believe that these countries have the same rights that we have. The hawks in the Trump administration see Iraq primarily as an arena for competition with Iran, and they behave accordingly by dismissing Iraqi concerns and complaints and trampling on Iraqi sovereignty when it suits them. The U.S. should be helping to support a stable and peaceful Iraq, but this administration’s obsession with opposing Iran at every turn puts Iraq in the middle of the crossfire. Hawks still haven’t reconciled themselves to the reality that the Iraq war that they enthusiastically supported was a huge gift to Iran and ensured that Iran would have considerable influence in Iraq. They cannot reverse this no matter how hard they try, and they clearly don’t have the first clue how to reverse it even if it were possible, but they drive U.S. foreign policy in the region into another ditch in a vain attempt to erase the consequences of the last time that hawks drove it into a ditch.

There are few things that hawks detest more than the idea of withdrawing U.S. troops, and so they would rather keep them in a country where they’re not welcome than admit their own blunders. This is what happens when opposition to troop withdrawals hardens into an inflexible ideological commitment. The U.S. military presence won’t be able to do much that is useful now that the Iraqi government no longer wants them there, but the hawkish mythology surrounding the last withdrawal at the end of 2011 requires them to claim against all the evidence that the U.S. presence is stabilizing and necessary. “America is a force for good in the Middle East,” Pompeo says again and again, and the alarming thing is that he and a lot of other people in the administration really believe this garbage.

The U.S. doesn’t have a compelling need to keep troops in Iraq. The Iraqi government doesn’t want them to stay. Only a fool or a fanatic would insist that we keep troops in a country where they aren’t wanted.