Former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis said Tuesday that the White House statement claiming Iran "has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program," could start a war whether it was an intentional statement or not.
"The question is, is this a message that John Bolton sent out himself and was later forced to walk back from Secretary of Defense, from the Secretary of State?" MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough said on "Morning Joe" Tuesday, according to Raw Story.
"Because that information contradicts what Secretary of State [Mike] Pompeo said just a couple of weeks ago."
"Wars can turn on words," Stavridis told Scarborough. "I'll give you three words from 1898: 'Remember the Maine.' U.S. battleship blows up in Havana Harbor, rallying cry, we go to war. It turns out the ship was blown up because of an internal boiler explosion, not enemy action."
"Words start wars, and to the earlier comments, there's no order and discipline going on here," the retired admiral added. "If you couple those two things together, we are clanking toward a serious problem internationally. That's what ought to worry us, even more than the internal pieces."
He added that the intention behind the wording may not matter, though he said that Bolton is too "smart" and "verbal" to have missed it, which Scarborough agreed with.
"I don't think this was incompetence," the host said. "I think this was John Bolton, or somebody connected to John Bolton, trying to send a message, a shot across the bow to Iran."
The retired admiral added that the recent unveiling of Israeli intelligence "feels like a tell, the whole thing feels like a leading indicator, and when you couple it with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu giving the speech in English, doing it, if you will, American-style, and then immediately following this. Occam's razor, sometimes the clearest answer is the simplest answer."
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