H.R. McMaster Warns Israel Could Act Against Iran Before End of Trump Administration

Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” H.R. McMaster, a former National Security Advisor for the Trump administration, offered an assessment of what could come in the final days of the Trump administration, assuming the vote outcome goes in Joe Biden favor, regarding tensions between Iran and Israel.

McMaster said it was possible Israel could act if it has detected a threat from Iran.

“You know, Israel follows the Begin Doctrine, right, which means that they will not accept a hostile state having the most destructive weapons on Earth,” he said. “And we have seen this in the past with Israeli Defense Force strikes in Syria. Remember 2007, when North Korea was helping construct a nuclear weapons facility in the Syrian desert, and the Israeli Defense Force struck that, and also similar strikes in Iraq as well earlier than that. So I think that it’s a possibility.”

“We’re — in some ways, Bret, we are back to kind of the 2006 period, when we knew that Iran was pursuing this threshold nuclear weapons capability, and tensions were higher, and the IDF was about to act at that point,” McMaster continued. “This is, I think, one of the reasons, because of the increasing tension, that Iran said, oh, yes, I’d like to negotiate now, because the sanctions against Iran were starting to bite against them, and the Israeli Defense Force, I think, was considering action.”

McMaster also warned against trying to return to the Iran nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration in 2017.

“Yes, it would be a really big mistake, Bret, to try to turn the clock back to 2016 and resurrect the Iran nuclear deal,” he added. “The Iran nuclear deal was a political disaster masquerading as a diplomatic triumph. It was a fundamentally flawed agreement, but what it didn’t do, and it didn’t — it didn’t consider really two fundamental issues that we have to take into consideration when you’re dealing with Iran, first of all, the hostile ideology of the regime, the ideology of the revolution, and, secondly, this four-decade-long proxy war against us, and the big payoffs to Iran, when the deal was signed, as well as the relief of sanctions. What did they do with that money? They applied that money to intensifying the sectarian violence across the region, in an effort really to put a proxy army on the border of Israel.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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