🇮🇷🇺🇸 A Pentagon board told Washington years ago why the region resents it, and the line that mattered got quietly cut before the public ever saw it
Ray McGovern came armed with the document.
A post-9/11 Defense Science Board paper, commissioned under Rumsfeld, that flatly rejected the "they hate our freedoms" line and said the resentment tracks to policy, above all one-sided support for Israel against Palestinian rights.
When the report finally surfaced months later, he says, that exact sentence had been excised.
To him, that erasure is the whole story of how the US keeps misreading the region.
His read on the present is grim.
Iran holds the strait, and that leverage, he argues, is the one card forcing everyone to the table.
The danger sits in Israel's corner: cornered and refusing the compromises that might de-escalate, with Katz openly saying the IDF won't leave Lebanon, Syria, or Gaza.
The hinge, in his telling, is whether Trump can make Netanyahu listen.
He thinks Trump is genuinely furious at being sold a "cakewalk" on February 28th, but doubts that anger translates into control.
And his darkest worry, offered as his fear rather than fact, is how far a cornered Israel might go.
His one flicker of hope rests on cooler heads in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing pulling the region back from a war nobody survives clean.
@raymcgovern
