A New Tactical Twist in the Coming War on Iran

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.chris-floyd.com/

An American strike on Iran is coming closer. It probably won't take place in the next few weeks, because Bush is on vacation and will not want to be disturbed. And it probably won't take the form that many have expected (including this writer). But Bush himself has raised the ante in recent days, warning of vague punishments for alleged Iranian misdeeds – and unleashing an outright lie that Iran has openly "proclaimed its desire for nuclear weapons," when of course the very opposite is true. And now McClatchy Newspapers brings fresh confirmation that the decider behind the Decider – Dick Cheney – is calling for airstrikes against Iran. Indeed, it seems Cheney has already chosen the casus belli for such an attack – a provocation that we will doubtless see occuring any day now.

For some time, it has been thought – with good reason – that the coming Bush-Cheney attack on Iran would be aimed at the country's rudimentary nuclear power facilities. And it's true the old "mushroom cloud in American cities" ploy continues to be the Administration's best propaganda gambit in demonizing Iran and instilling fear of this demon in the public, as Bush demonstrated with his Goebbelsian lie this week. But even a ruthless, authoritarian "Unitary Executive" regime faces some political restraints on its brutal ambitions, as we noted here yesterday. It cannot act on its most radical plans until the PR ground has been properly prepared. (Even a supreme despot like Hitler was forced by public opposition to cancel his "Action T4" program of murdering the "inferior stock" of mentally and physically disabled people in Germany.) And the fact remains that it would be difficult to move even the docile American public to any great support for a sudden, massive assault on Iran's nuclear sites, when even the White House has to admit that Iran does not have nuclear weapons yet.

Recall that in the mendacious warmongering for the Iraq invasion, Bush and Cheney repeatedly insisted that Saddam Hussein did possess a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, as Cheney himself declared outright on national television just before the attack: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." To sell the war to the American people, they had to sell the idea of Iraq actually possessing WMD. They have not been able to do that with Iran.

At least not yet. But Bush's lie about Iran's "open desire" for nuclear weapons is probably the beginning of a broader push to establish a fantasy scenario of a nuclear-armed Iran. If he is allowed to get away with an utterly false and easily disproven assertion about Tehran's open desire to build a bomb –and he has gotten away with it, completely, as Arthur Sibler notes – then what's to stop him from moving on to the next level, and declaring that Iran now possesses nuclear weapons? The Administration could simply assert that its secret intelligence sources have confirmed the existence of an Iranian nuke, despite the insistence of the International Atomic Energy Agency that it is not so.