With the memory of the saber-rattling prelude to the US’ 2003 invasion of Iraq largely faded, many of that war’s biggest proponents have recently found themselves uniting behind a new cause – the dissolution of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In recent weeks, their calls for destroying the deal have grown — especially as President Donald Trump, who has long criticized the deal, seems determined to make a decision on deal’s ultimate fate within the coming month . While the dissolution of an international agreement may hardly seem as imminently dangerous as the invasion – and destruction – of another country, the end-game for those seeking to annul the agreement is ultimately the same.Take, for instance, the recent rhetoric of John Bolton, former Bush-era State Department official and ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, now a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, recently argued in the Wall Street Journal that JCPOA was not worth saving, stating that Iran’s compliance and certification are not the issue. The issue instead, he states, is “whether we will protect US interests and shatter the illusion that Mr. Obama’s deal is achieving its stated goals, or instead timidly hope for the best while trading with the enemy, as the Europeans are doing.”Bolton’s op-ed essentially calls for a rejection of diplomacy – something the Trump administration has already done in North Korea’s case – and resurrects “weapons of mass destruction” claims targeting the Iranian government. For instance, Bolton makes the bizarre speculative assertion that “even US intelligence could be in the dark if Iran is renting a uranium enrichment facility under a North Korean mountain.” In other words, Bolton asserts that – deal or no deal, monitoring or no monitoring – the Iranians cannot be trusted.This, of course, is hardly surprising coming from Bolton – one of the great champions of the “weapons of mass destruction” myth that led to the US invasion of Iraq. Indeed it was Bolton who orchestrated the firing of the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in order to hide the shaky foundation upon which the WMD narrative was based. Despite the fact that such weapons were never discovered , that an estimated half a million Iraqi civilians died, and that the conflict spawned the rise of Daesh (ISIS) in Iraq, Bolton has boasted that he has “no regrets” about promoting the Iraq War, and argues that the “worst decision” made post-invasion was the withdrawal of

US

and coalition forces in 2011.

Though one could argue, based on the above, that Bolton merely wishes to do away with the agreement and isn’t pushing for war per se, his past arguments against the Iran deal show that war with Iran is what Bolton ultimately seeks. In a