By Simon Watkins - Aug 28, 2019, 6:00 PM CDT
... “Iran’s view is now that the U.S. will not launch the full-scale military attack that was previously expected, that the U.S. is increasingly isolated in its actions against Iran among its allies in Europe and even in the U.K.,” a senior source who works closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com last week. “At the same time, Iran believes it can lever the U.S. back into a newly renegotiated nuclear deal involving the removal of all sanctions,” he added.
Up until a couple of months or so ago, the U.S. was actively considering a full-scale military operation against Iran and was “98 per cent ready” for such an all-out attack, according to senior political sources in Washington and London spoken to by OilPrice.com last week. “The remaining two percent involved the final movement of men and materiel into attack positions and finalising the technology and software involved,” said one. “At that point, [John] Bolton [U.S. National Security Advisor] was the dominant voice in [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s ear, and this meant moving at least 120,000 troops into position to augment the [U.S.S Abraham Lincoln aircraft] carrier group that was already in place. At about the same point, though, some of the President’s very close longstanding personal advisers and very senior CIA figures persuaded him that it would be an utter disaster, both militarily and economically, given the scale of the Iranian military and the terrain involved, its ability to launch guerrilla warfare anywhere in the world through its military proxies Hezbollah and Hamas and others, and its ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz,” one of the sources added. “In short, it was put to him that such a [full scale] military attack on Iran would lead to consequences potentially of a least the same length as the Afghanistan conflict and of at least the severity of Islamic State’s peak power,” he added...
--- Opposing Bolton and the other hawks in the U.S. are some of the most senior figures in the U.S. intelligence community. One of these, Dan Coats, left his position as Director of National Intelligence U.S. National Intelligence – purportedly over differences with others in the Trump administration over Russia and North Korea – but also shortly after even he testified to a Senate Committee prior to the withdrawal of the U.S from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal that there was no indication that Iran was attempting to develop a nuclear weapon and that Tehran remained in compliance with the deal.
Another notable exception to the pro-attack view, OilPrice.com understands, is the CIA’s Head of Iran Mission Center, Michael D’Andrea. Known as ‘the Dark Prince’ for his work in the U.S.’s sharp-end counter-terrorism operations after the ‘9/11’ attacks, and even the key figure in organising the elimination of one of Hezbollah’s leaders, Imad Mougniyeh, in Damascus, in 2008 – when D’Andrea was Head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (from 2006) – he has voiced concerns over such an overt military strategy...
https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Middle-East/The-CIAs-Dark-Prince-Doesnt-Want-War-With-Iran.html#