If everyone says they want to avoid another conflict in the Middle East, why are the dangers of a wider, catastrophic war against Iran so high?

The answer is that most of the key players have been lying.

The road to a major war — with the ultimate goal of finally crushing Iran — has been years in the planning. And the events this past week, however chaotic, may be remembered as simply another step along the way.

In the tangled history of the Middle East, it is often illuminating to examine an event first, and then go back in time to understand why it happened.

The event last Saturday was the dramatic attack on Saudi Arabia’s oilfields that knocked out half of the country’s production.

Both Saudi and U.S. officials blamed Iran for the attacks, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling it “an act of war.” For its part, Iran has consistently denied direct involvement but it is likely that Iran provided support in some way.

So, given that, why would Iran get involved in such a provocative attack?

Inadvertently, it was Pompeo who provided part of the answer.

During a visit to Saudi Arabia, he defended Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and engage in a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.

The goal of the U.S. policy, ostensibly, has been to bring Iran back to the negotiating table, but its critics have said it is to provoke and break Iran.

Pompeo seemed to confirm this: “Some suggest that the president’s strategy isn’t working. I would argue just the converse of that … What you are seeing is a direct result of us reversing the enormous failure” of the Iran nuclear deal.

However, the fact is that the deal is failing largely because of the U.S. withdrawal.

In 2015, Iran’s government infuriated its own political hardliners by becoming part of the deal. In exchange for rejecting nuclear weapons, Iran was supposed to receive economic benefits but, instead, it has suffered under extensive new sanctions.

Iran has been frustrated that Europe, in particular, hasn’t delivered on its promises and has clearly made the calculation that only by forcefully hitting back will it get the world’s attention.

But if the overriding objective with Iran has been to ensure it never gets nuclear weapons, why would the U.S. — encouraged by Saudi Arabia and Israel — sabotage the one agreement that achieved that goal?

Again, we need to go back in time to discover the answer.

One of the key foreign policy objectives of Barack Obama’s presidency was to eliminate any chance that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons. And in this, he had the support of Europe, Russia and China.

More than anything, this inflamed America’s military hawks and the Republican leadership. They shared the fear of Israel and Saudi Arabia that this agreement would lead to the gradual reintegration of Iran, their archrival in the Middle East, into the international community.

And more importantly, they decided to do something about it.

What they did was carefully laid out earlier this month in a special investigative piece — titled “The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran” — published in the New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit.

Given the current tensions in the Gulf, it is quite prescient. It tells the story of hawks in Israel and the U.S. spending more than a decade agitating for war against Iran.

For them, the godsend was Trump’s election in 2016 and his willingness to scrap the nuclear deal. Their plan is based on the gamble, according the article, “that Iran will break before November 2020” — either through economic or military pressure — “when the next American election could bring a new president who ends Trump’s hardball tactics.”

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This is “all in aid of what the president’s advisers see as the larger goal,” states the report, and that is “a realignment of the Middle East, with Israel and select Sunni nations gaining supremacy over Iran.”

The Trump administration was even warned by the CIA that its hardline pressure could provoke Iran to “unleash an attack in the Persian Gulf.”

In other words: so far, it is all going according to plan.

Tony Burman , formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributing foreign affairs columnist for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyBurman

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