It doesn't matter how you sell it...

It's still preemptive war on a sovereign nation, and it's just as illegal as the one we started in Iraq four and a half years ago...

Sy Hersh:

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran.

This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

And it will still yield nothing but more misery for millions in the region as well as inflaming an already volatile situation and risking the spread of it across seas and oceans:

A senior European diplomat, who works closely with American intelligence, told me that there is evidence that Iran has been making extensive preparation for an American bombing attack. “We know that the Iranians are strengthening their air-defense capabilities,” he said, “and we believe they will react asymmetrically—hitting targets in Europe and in Latin America.”

All of this is not based on hard intelligence, but, like the hollow bellowings of 2002 about WMDs in Iraq and the empty trumpeting about an Iranian Nuclear weapons program in the past few years (in the face of the results of repeated arduous IAEA inspections pointing to exactly the opposite conclusion), the illusion of intelligence, broadcast with such volume and in such panic stricken tones to the general populace (by willing allies in the media and the administration) that the average citizen who is accustomed to being spoon fed anything and everything that they conceivably would need to think about or pretend to have thought about and developed an opinion on until the masses are squarely behind action. Never mind what the action is, or who the action is focussed on, or what the secondary and long term results of the action may be, action must be taken immediately.

Scott Ritter:

65% of the American public aren’t antiwar. They’re just anti-losing. You see, if we were winning the war in Iraq, they’d all be for it. If we had brought democracy, they’d be cheering the President. It wouldn’t matter that we violated international law. It wouldn’t even matter that we lied about weapons of mass destruction. We’d be winning. God bless America. Ain’t we good? USA, USA! But we’re losing, so they’re against Iraq.

But what happens when you get your butt kicked in one game? You’re looking for the next game, where you can win. And right now, we’re looking for Iran for a victory.

This is exactly the wrong path for us to even contemplate going down, and the scary thing is that we've already started down it:

Ritter again, in conversation with Amy Goodman:

Look, we’re already overflying Iran with unmanned aerial vehicles, pilotless drones. On the ground, the CIA is recruiting Mojahedin-e-Khalq, recruiting Kurds, recruiting Azeris, who are operating inside Iran on behalf of the United States of America. And there is reason to believe that we’ve actually put uniformed members of the United States Armed Forces and American citizens operating as CIA paramilitaries inside Iranian territory to gather intelligence.

Now, when you violate the borders and the airspace of a sovereign nation with paramilitary and military forces, that’s an act of war. That’s an act of war. So, when Americans say, “Ah, there’s not going to be a war in Iran,” there's already a war in Iran. We’re at war with Iran. We’re just not in the declared conventional stage of the war.


If the U.S. goes into Iran in an obvious and invasive manner any shred of political, and moral capital that may exist for it with the rest of the world will disappear like a snowball melting on a hot stove.

The best way for us to protect our troops is to bring them home and end our criminal occupation of a land that was a sovereign nation until we invaded it and destroyed any semblance of government and civil institution in the name of regime change and imperialism, not by illegally invading another nation on the potentially most convincing and polarizing pretext of the week.