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dangerous dick .....Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official. J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal. McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposal several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran", citing two officials involved in Iran policy. According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think-tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation for such an attack. Carpenter said the DoD officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about how far the administration would go - what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks".
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alarum, alarum .....
It is not only because of insatiable greed for oil, or because of America's addiction to war or because of Bush's obvious mental instability that America and its allies now seem hell-bent on attacking Iran, although these factors are certainly important.
Equally crucially, the current wave of fervent war-mongering in the West directed against Iran owes to the enormous clout wielded by Western Christian fundamentalist organizations who, following the invasion and destruction of Iraq, which they had so fervently abetted, are now calling for a repeat performance, this time in Iran.
These blood-thirsty votaries of the cult of unmitigated violence consider Iran to be the major challenge to American and Zionist imperialism, which they regard as enjoying divine blessing.
Insisting that America and Israel should invade Iran at once, they regard this as a Christian necessity. They also believe that this would herald a global war of cosmic proportions that would, so they believe, usher in the end of the world and Jesus' Second Coming, something that they passionately await.
Target Iran: Christian Fundamentalists' Road To The End Of The World
for a less hysterical view of reality …..
The hard, cold truth of the matter is that Iran represents exactly zero threat to the American people or our constitutional form of government. Its army is small, its navy even smaller, and its air force nonexistent. Iran’s economy is in a shambles and its people are increasingly disillusioned with their government. Even if the Iranians somehow succeeded in developing a nuclear weapon, they have no delivery system, and they would have every reason not to use it against America.
Yet the war drums continue their ominous beat. President Bush persists with his bellicose rhetoric. John McCain continues to sing his deranged war songs, and even the saintly (toady?) Barack Obama has jumped on the war wagon.
The only civilized and proper response to this war hysteria is a healthy dose of disparaging humor. Those who, with a straight face, claim that Iran represents some sort of actual danger to America deserve only derisive laughter. They are ignoramuses (or...even worse...they know the truth and are trying to play us for ignoramuses).
There’s An Iranian Under Our Bed!