Things are happening here, and frankly, it scares the shit out of me:

• The IAEA has contradicted recent reports of the advanced status of Iran's nuclear program, and has indicated that Iran is cooperating well and making progress. And yet Bush continues to make dire warnings about Iran and nuclear weapons.
• Norman Podhoretz, a leading neoconservative, who "makes Paul Wolfowitz… seem almost a moderate realist," and who recently wrote an essay advocating an attack on Iran, is on Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy team.
• Some Russian bombers recently flew really close to UK airspace. Russia has a pretty good relationship with Iran, because the Iranians like to buy their weapons.
• Syria recently fired on Israeli aircraft.
• Our air force just flew six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to an air force base in Louisiana that may be a Middle East staging area. They said the nukes were a mistake, but the cruise missiles were on purpose.
• Iran says that the US is behind Kurdish rebel attacks inside Iran.

Let's think about it for a second. In the region, we have Sunni and Shiite factions openly fighting and practicing ethnic cleansing in Iraq. We have Iran, which is Shiite, and may or may not be supporting or participating in the fighting in Iraq. We have Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which are Shiite and openly supported by Iran. We have Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni, and which is the birthplace of Al Qaeda and the home country of nearly all the 9/11 hijackers. We have Israel, which is hated by Sunni and Shiite alike. We have Hamas, which is Sunni, and which does not have any regional ambitions other than the eradication of Israel. We have the Kurds in northern Iraq, who are friendly to the US and not at all to Iran, and who would like to declare independence from Iraq. We have Turkey, which is opposed to Kurdish independence. And we have the United States, which is about as universally hated as Israel, and whose military is stretched thin because of commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Okay, so let's say we attack Iran using air power exclusively, because we can't commit any ground troops to an invasion. Iran, weakened but still capable on the ground, immediately moves into Iraq in force to engage Americans. They also hit Kurdistan in retaliation for the rebel attacks on their soil. Hezbollah and Syria begin to bombard Israel with rockets, because hey, you might as well (remember, Saddam did the same thing back in the first Gulf war). Syria may take the opportunity to overthrow the Lebansese government. Saudi Arabia perceives a problem in Iraq, because the Iranian troops are there, and if they gain access to southern Iraq, they'll be at the Saudis' doorstep. Basra is the main city in southern Iraq, and it's predominantly Shiite, and therefore possibly sympathetic to Iran. So Saudi Arabia sends troops into Iraq. Iraq's government, which is on life support anyway, bites the dust. Meanwhile, Israel is retaliating against Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran with airstrikes, and Turkey invades Kurdistan to protect their interests there.

And let's not forget that Israel and the United States both have nuclear weapons. Oh, and you can forget about oil supplies for the next twenty years while everybody fights it out.

So now you have, incredibly, a far worse godawful mess in the region than the godawful mess we have now. And it's closer to being a reality than you think, folks. The administration wants to invade Iran. They have their contingency plans all set. They know what targets they will hit. Right now, in the media, what you are seeing is the administration attempting to turn public opinion against Iran. They want you to think that the Iranian government is killing Americans in Iraq, and that their acquisition of nuclear weapons is imminent. They did the exact same thing in the run-up to the Iraq war - they said Iraq was behind 9/11, and they said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They were lying then, and they're lying now.

This is real, people. They want to do this. They are trying to do it right now. Do not fall for it. We cannot afford to attack Iran.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 7:07 am and is filed under News and politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.