‘It’s both fascinating and
dismaying watching the manufactured `crisis’ over Iran reach new intensity each
week. 

Iran poses no real military
threat to anyone, but listening to the Bush Administration or the US media one
would think that that Tehran was about to unleash a nuclear holocaust on the
world. 

What we are seeing is a rerun of
the administration’s massive propaganda offensive that led to the invasion of
Iraq. There is also no doubt that the Bush Administration has been planning a
major air war against Iran. 

But the Bush Administration has used Iran’s gleefully
announcement that it enriched uranium to 3.5% (83% is need for nuclear
weapons), to generate a major US-Iranian crisis seven months before national
mid-term elections. The administration clearly hopes its lurid claims that Iran
is a nuclear threat to the world will whip gullible Americans back into war
fever. A bombing campaign before elections would likely reverse the
Republican’s steep decline in the polls. 

Much of the administration’s anti-Iranian jihad has been
orchestrated, like the attack on Iraq, by Vice President Dick Cheney, who
increasingly emerges as the Rasputin of the Bush presidency. Cheney is very
close to Israel’s political far right. He is carrying out former Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon’s command to the US that once it invaded Iraq, `march
immediately on Tehran.’ 

Cheney, and the pro-Israel neoconservatives around him,
have long worked closely with Israel’s rightists, Mossad intelligence service,
and Israel’s strategic planners. All agree that Iran, not Iraq, was the greater
enemy of Israel, and one that had at all costs to be crushed before it could
develop nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them.’ 

Countdown
Over Iran