USA readies for war Iran

War on Iran for Challenging US Domination Seumas Milne, The Guardian

It seems almost incredible after the catastrophe of the Iraq War, but the signs are growing that the Bush administration wants to do it all over again — this time to Iran. Just as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Washington air is thick with unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction; demonization of the country’s president has reached bizarre proportions; intelligence leaks about links with Al-Qaeda and attacks on US and British targets are now routine; demands for war from the administration’s neoconservative outriders are becoming increasingly strident; the pronouncements of George Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, are turning ever more belligerent — and administration sources claim that the British government is privately ready to play ball. You might imagine after invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq at such huge human and strategic cost, an attack on another Muslim country would be the last thing on the US president’s mind. But the drumbeat of war has been unmistakable since the summer, when Bush declared he had “authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities,” and the administration let it be known that it was preparing to brand Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist organization.” Last month Bernard Kouchner, the hawkish new French foreign minister, insisted that “we must expect the worst” and “the worst is war” — while Mohamed El-Baradei, the UN’s chief weapons inspector in charge of overseeing Iran’s nuclear program, warned against the “neo-crazies” pushing for an attack after 700,000 had died in Iraq on “suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons.” Meanwhile, Israel’s recent air raid on Iran’s ally Syria has been widely interpreted as, at least in part, a power play aimed at Tehran. This week John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN, used the Tory conference to call for an attack on Iran, as leaks to the US press about war preparations continued. Newsweek reported that Cheney had been discussing the possibility of encouraging Israel to launch missile strikes at an Iranian nuclear site in order to provoke Iran into “lashing out,” and open the way to a wider US assault. And in the New Yorker magazine, the investigative writer Seymour Hersh reported that in a videoconference this summer Bush told the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, that he was thinking of attacking targets in Iran, and the British “were on board.” Source: