Things are heating up...

U.S. developing contingency plan to bomb Iran: report

Sun Feb 25, 2007 9:42AM EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Despite the Bush administration's insistence it has no plans to go to war with Iran, a Pentagon panel has been created to plan a bombing attack that could be implemented within 24 hours of getting the go-ahead from President George W. Bush, The New Yorker magazine reported in its latest issue.

The special planning group was established within the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in recent months, according to an unidentified former U.S. intelligence official cited in the article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in the March 4 issue.

Hersh on CNN here.

And:

From The Sunday Times

February 25, 2007

US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack

Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter, Washington

SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

Oh, and this:

US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran

By William Lowther in Washington DC and Colin Freeman, Sunday Telegraph

Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 25/02/2007

America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.

	President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime is accused of repressing minority rights and culture

In a move that reflects Washington's growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran's border regions.

The Coming War with Iran

From the Project for Defense Alternatives, a great site with links to tons of articles on every aspect of the Iran situation: Confronting Iran: Critical perspectives on the current crisis, its origins, and implications

Propaganda watch

Glenn Greenwald dissects today's NY Times stenography of the Bush administration on Iran.

Or maybe it is a tape recorder. Shorter Michael Gordon:

U.S. Says...United States intelligence asserts...reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies...civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided...military officials say...The officials said...The assessment was described in interviews over the past several weeks with American officials...Administration officials said...according to the intelligence...According to American intelligence...Some American intelligence experts believe...they assert...notes a still-classified American intelligence report...a senior administration official said...according to Western officials...Officials said...An American intelligence assessment described to The New York Times said...Other officials believe...American military officers say...American officials say...According to American intelligence agencies...Assessments by American intelligence agencies say...Marine officials say...American intelligence agencies are concerned...Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week.

"What Digby Says"

a snippet:

I think they are foolishly counting on Bush not following through which is a shameful miscalculation if not political malpractice --- you simply have to assume after observing him all these years that he will. He and Cheney are desperately unpopular and they have come to believe that their legacy will be redeemed by history, so parochial concerns about popular support or public will in their own time are irrelevant. Indeed, I think they probably believe they have to do this in order that history will clearly see how they bucked the tide of popular opinion and expert advice to remake the middle east. It's all they have.

Democrats cannot abet this, not even rhetorically, to satisfy a powerful lobbying group that may be as mad as the neocons and the Bush administration. This time, they will not be let off the hook. Bush is out in two years and if any of them are on record talking trash about Iran at this delicate moment, they will be held accountable for what follows.

Scott Ritter says it here:

While President Bush, a Republican, remains Commander in Chief, a Democrat-controlled Congress shares responsibility on war and peace from this point on. The conflict in Iraq, although ongoing, is a product of the Republican-controlled past. The looming conflict with Iran, however, will be assessed as a product of a Democrat-controlled present and future. If Iraq destroyed the Republican Party, Iran will destroy the Democrats.

We'll be lucky if it only destroys the Democratic party. The stakes are actually much higher for all of us than that.

Read the rest here.

Propaganda, Fascism and the coming war with Iran

I claim no great prescience or brilliance. I was just paying attention, reading and searching for information, using a little historical knowledge and reasoning ability. Stephen Hadley continues to say that the term "civil war" does not apply; of course not: the word is clusterfuck -- unexpurgated. And those of us who were paying attention predicted this.

Now the long-planned hit on Iran is coming. Maybe I will be wrong. There is always a possibility of the Democrats or military leaders stopping the Bush administration. There is even the possibility that they have not been planning on attacking Iran next all along.

The coming months will also put a couple of terms to the test -- for me. I tend to try to avoid using the words propaganda and fascism because I think people have trouble taking them seriously. But the value of words is when they describe reality. So, leaving aside the question of whether it has already been proven that Fox News, for example, is a propaganda outfit and the Bush administration is moving toward (or has embraced) fascism -- using the rigorous definitions of the terms -- I would like to watch (at a distance) the performance of Fox News and the Bush Administration to see how they conform to predictions arising from the strict social scientific and political definitions of propaganda and fascism.

One of the things about history is that we historians don't deal with the future. Unlike true social scientists, our models cannot be tested for their predictive value -- except retroactively, which has its value but .... But we can use analytical terms that have arisen to describe social and historical reality and note tendencies, deriving "lessons learned." That it why I find it useful to compare the Iraq situation to past experiences. The trick is figuring out which stories give us lessons and why. You gotta be flexible, not doctrinaire.

I am not actually trying to do that here; I am not trying to ascertain, for example, whether we are "repeating" the experience of Germany in the 1930s. I am simply laying out my prediction that we will see a textbook propaganda campaign -- but not necessarily one that has made it into the textbooks; expect something different than the run-up to the Iraq War; there will be no presentation to the UN, no attempt to get them to sign on, no attempt really to persuade the American public; an event will transpire that will provide the pretext for action and the President will present it to us as a fait accompli. "We have always been at war with Iran." Of course, this has already begun, and it is not only Fox and their accomplices. As Bob Somerby, Media Matters, Greg Sargeant (google 'em; I'm too lazy to link) and others demonstrate daily, they have plenty of help from the rest of the press playing their roles perfectly.

Similarly, with "creeping fascism." I have a great deal of hope that the Democrats will fight the worst of it. But clearly the party has not caught up to the rest of the American people. I am kinda with Steve Gilliard, who predicts a sudden and early departure for both Bush and Cheney. I would not lay money on it, but I do think something will come out in the trials and investigations that will very quickly tip the scales; Cheney will go, replaced by (no prediction); Bush not long after when the next revelation reveals itself.

This makes the need for more war soon all the more urgent for Bush and Cheney.

maybe starting up again

am toying with starting this thing up again. playing with the design.

here is something worth looking at:

Israelis, America and Iran

It sounds like the stuff that conspiracy theories are made of. In a coastal resort near Tel Aviv, senior Israeli politicians and generals confer with top officials and politicians from Washington to discuss the threat of a nuclear Iran. In any good conspiracy theory, however, these talks would be going on in secret – preferably in an underground bunker. In fact the Herzliya conference on “Israel’s national security” is taking place perfectly openly in a smart hotel. And I am in the audience.

more here...