Late Thursday night, the Israeli military launched a preemptive strike against Iran, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said targeted Iranian nuclear scientists, ballistic missile sites and Natanz, one of the country’s top enrichment facilities. The strike also reportedly killed the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as well as several other top-ranking Iranian officers.

As the world anxiously waits to see if Israel’s strike against Iran dramatically increases the possibility of a greater conflict or all-out regional war, with America soon targeted along with Israel, it is worth noting that there was an aggressive lobbying campaign directed at the White House by various neocons and “hawks” with the goal of Israel taking just such an action. Did they have information no one else had, or were they running on raw and potentially inflammatory emotion?

Earlier this week, Politico ran a piece headlined, “Inside the MAGA vs. hawk battle to sway Trump on bombing Iran.” The article begins, “An influential group of GOP hawks has launched a behind-the-scenes lobbying offensive pressing President Donald Trump to not only back off his administration’s quest for a nuclear deal with Iran, but greenlight an attack on Tehran by Israel.”

This group was not only lobbying Trump to give the “wink and nod” to Israel to attack, but worse, were trying to scuttle the president’s ongoing negotiations to get a nuclear deal with Iran and to bring peace to the region.

Lobbying against the elimination of a nuclear threat and against........

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