THE ROAD TO RUIN

Israel has long desired regime change in Tehran, but previous US administrations sought to contain it. Allies and foes alike fear Donald Trump’s intervention in Israel’s war has poured fuel on an increasingly international conflict

- 

Late last Friday night, eight US B-2 bombers took off from Whiteman air force base in Missouri and turned westwards towards the Pacific.

Amateur flight trackers plotted their progress on social media as the black flying-wing warplanes joined up midair with refuelling tankers and checked in with air traffic controllers once they had reached the open ocean.

The bombers' flight towards the US Pacific base on Guam triggered speculation that Donald Trump was arranging pieces on the board before a decision on whether to join Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.

The previous day, Trump had let it be known that he would make that decision over the following two weeks, suggesting a window remained open for some last-ditch diplomatic alternative to war. He angrily denied a Wall Street Journal report that he had already approved a strike plan.

The British, French and German foreign ministers seized the opportunity to meet their Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, for talks in Geneva last Friday but to little or no avail.

We know now that the B-2 flights over the Pacific were part an elaborate ruse to ensure Iran was off guard and looking the wrong way, and that the president's declared two-week diplomatic window was likely to have been part of the same ploy.

The Pentagon described the eight bombers flying west as a decoy, a deception effort known only to a small number of planners and leaders in Washington and at central command headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

As they were tracked across the western states and then the Pacific, another seven B-2s took off from Whiteman base and headed in the opposite direction-eastwards. These seven planes made no communications with each other or with the ground as they crossed America and flew unnoticed over the Atlantic.