Cotton’s anti-Iran rhetoric designed to please AIPAC masters: American military analyst

The pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC has picked US Senator Tom Cotton to make war against Iran, amid the Obama administration’s efforts to negotiate peace with the Islamic Republic, an American military analyst in New York says.

In an interview on Tuesday, the freshman Republican senator from Arkansas said he wants the United States to bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a war he believes would only take a few days to win outright.

The US military campaign against Iran “would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days’ air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior,” Cotton said.

Commenting to Press TV, Michael Burns said on Thursday, “This jingoistic saber-rattling by Senator Tom Cotton is really the outer edge of the folly of American foreign policy.”

“This man, who had one term in the House of Representatives – he is from the southwest Arkansas – squeaked out an election against a longtime Democrat, Mark Pryor from Arkansas,” Burns said.

“He was funded basically by the Jewish lobby, by AIPAC, the whole crowd of them put tremendous amount of money into his campaign, and as a reward this fellow is out in front to try and make war against Iran,” he added.

Last week, the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – reached an outline of a potentially historic agreement with Iran over Tehran’s civilian nuclear work that would lift all international sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic in exchange for certain steps Tehran will take with regard to its nuclear program.

The understanding is considered a major breakthrough in the West’s 12-year standoff with Iran over its nuclear energy program.

Burns said that “after the sad, dolorous, painful record of our ventures in war-making in the Middle East … now when we have a chance to reach an accommodation, an agreement to tighten the tethers on the dogs of war with Iran, what does this crazy senator from Arkansas propose? A quick bombing of another sovereign country.”

“And the funny thing is after centuries of history, we know that the wars don’t end very easily,” he said. “Shakespeare said, ‘the hand that picks up the armament of war so quickly finds it much more difficult to put it down.’”

“So the absurdity of this man, who has by the way great educational background -- Harvard College, Harvard Law, he’s a senator, he was an army lieutenant -- you think that there would be a little common sense attached to his escutcheon, but no with that Jewish lobby – AIPAC -- behind him, he’s been anointed, indeed charged with trying to get this country into war,” he noted.

Cotton reportedly received one million dollars from the Emergency Committee for Israel, a neoconservative group associated with Israel lobby, just before the last US election. The group was founded in mid-2010 by William [Bill] Kristol, a US neoconservative political analyst.

A group of 47 Republican senators sent an open letter to Iran’s leaders last month, warning that whatever agreement reached with the Obama administration would be a “mere executive agreement” and that Congress could ultimately walk away from any deal with Tehran upon review.

The White House has denounced the GOP letter as an “unprecedented” and “calculated” attempt to interfere with the Iran nuclear talks.

Senator Cotton claimed that he had drafted the letter. However, independent analysts say the letter was actually written by Kristol, his main financier.

“The idea of this man out in front is the worst sort of bizarre theatre. Hopefully, someone would put a shroud over him, like the falcons, to keep him the perch, because I can’t imagine any policy maker, anyone who is significant, certainly the American citizens, taking this guy very seriously,” Burns said.

“The only people that really take him seriously are his AIPAC masters who fund him. And perhaps that’s all what he wants out of this term in office,” he noted.

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