New US Counterterrorism Strategy Aimed at Starting War with Iran - Analyst

The Trump administration's 25-page document outlining its new counterterrorism strategy is all about setting up the chess pieces for a looming war with Iran, international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda told Sputnik.
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Sleboda told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear on Friday that the new strategy sounds more like the "we're-getting-ready-to-go-to-war-with-Iran document."

White House National Security Adviser John Bolton announced on Thursday that US President Donald Trump had approved a new US counterterrorism strategy.

Bolton told reporters that the new strategy was "the nation's first robust, fully articulated counterterrorism strategy since 2011."

Bolton also made strong remarks, stating that Iran was the "world's central banker for international terrorism since 1979" and that he'd "never seen anything like the scope of the Chinese activities" to meddle in America's domestic affairs, such as the 2018 midterm elections.

​"Calling Iran the ‘world's central banker for terrorism since 1979'… I'd love to see the sourcing on that… it's ridiculous; it's not true," the analyst told hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou.

"When's the last time you heard about a Shia suicide bomber? The world's largest terrorism sponsor is Saudi Arabia."

"They try to bring in Iran and the Iranian revolution, and they talk about the threat that Iranian terrorism presents to the United States and its interests, but, personally, I can't remember the last time that Iran launched suicide bombers or some type of attack on the US," Sleboda said.

White House Approves Broad New Counterterrorism Strategy - Bolton

With a focus on "radical Islamist" terrorist groups, the six-pronged approach being wheeled out by the White House prescribes pursuing terrorists to their source; isolating terrorists from their sources of support; modernizing and integrating the United States' counterterrorism tools; protecting American infrastructure and enhancing resilience; countering terrorist radicalization and recruitment; and strengthening the counterterrorism abilities of the US' international partners.

Sleboda told Becker that the document is an "obsolete obfuscation, both of the actual threat and what we're going to be looking at," before noting that the new strategy fails to differ from those employed by previous administrations.

"[The approach] is all pretty boilerplate stuff; it's nothing that the Obama administration did any different," he said, adding that the War on Terror is simply a "geopolitical tool" instrumentalized to drive US influence across the world.

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