Attack on Iran?

Is America going to go to war with Iran? Either directly or via its proxy Israel? Insane you might say, because it would disrupt oil supplies, send them shooting to $200 a barrel; implausible, because she hasn't enough forces. Criminal, because it contravenes the Nuremberg conventions and Iran is a country at peace that poses no threat to the US.
So I would have thought not, until I read two figures I held in high regard just over Christmas. One is Scott Ritter, the former UN chief inspector to Iraq, being interviewed in the non-mainstream Democracy Now website on Iran. He had written a book about the preparations for an upcoming war, talking to intelligence officials based the region (he as one himself), carefully scouring the Middle Eastern press for clues that never appear in the New York Times. He spoke of Mujahedeen cult groups, based in Kurdistan and Azerbaijan, once labelled terrorist by the US, now allies, infiltrating across the border into Iran, where they have ethnic brethren, to gather and collect intelligence about Iran's nuclear weapons programme on the ground. He said the Israelis were using this intelligence badly, because they applied a system of analysis that deviated from what they had learnt at the Yom Kippur war, which is to double- and triple- check all facts; intelligence these days, he said, has become more sloppy and faith based. And he predicted with great certainty that Israel would launch strikes, similar to the ones carried out on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. There would be tacit support from the Americans, perhaps from ships, perhaps from ground troops in Iraq.
Second, I read the reliable Seymour Hersh's latest piece in the New Yorker, dated November. He has been following Bush's Iran policy for years. He said that the CIA had issued a report earlier this autumn that denied that Iran was running a nuclear weapons programme parallel to its civilian nuclear programme. (To which it is entitled of course according to the Nuclear Proliferation treaty.) The report was based on technical intelligence collected from satellites, measuring the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data had been gathered by secret US and Israeli agents placing radioactivity detection devices outside suspected nuclear weapons plants. No amounts of radioactivity were found.
But worryingly this report was being ignored in the White House, where Dick Cheney, chief hawk, was taking no evidence as the fact that Iranians had them and were hiding them. An absurd and unanswerable piece of Alice and Wonderland logic. Nevertheless, it was exactly the kind of argument used to bring the US into the attack on Iraq.
So I was not surpised this morning when I saw the Sunday Times's lead story, saying that Israel had drawn up plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. The piece said that two Israeli air force squadrons were training to blow up an Iranian facility by using low kilotonnage bunker busters, quoting Israeli military sources.
According to the paper, conventional laser guided bombs would tunnel under the target and then the mini nukes would be fired into the plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of fallout. “As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the military sources.
The paper speculated that the leaks from their Israeli military sources could be sabre rattling (combined with the arrival of US warships in the Gulf - along with British ones - who authorised them to be there in the total absence of a debate in the UK?)so as to put pressure on the Iranians to stop what they say is only a civilian nuclear programme. But it could also be that the Israelis have made up their minds and are preparing opinion for a strike. Just reading about it becomes a kind of acceding to it.
As for the evidence, the newspaper swallowed a lot of the background, presenting the Israeli line; The Sunday Times wrote: "This is enough, however, to convince some Israelis that Iran is reaching the “point of no return” at which it has the technical know-how to build a nuclear bomb."
It quoted: "Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, has told members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that his organisation assumes the Iranians will have a complete nuclear device by 2009."
Note how this belief, which is unsupported, is at odds with the CIA assessment.
One thing worth thinking about is that there was a supporting story on the BBC today, talking of Iranian spies' dirty tricks in Iraq - a slight shift of stance from an organisation that just three months ago ran a cultural events week on Iran to counteract US negativism. This was based on a briefing by British officials, suggesting that they could be in on the Israeli-US game to build up opinion against Iran. Note the double standards: there has been nothing on the numerous incursions by American and Israeli spies into Iran.
So it seems the Brits are on board project Middle East conflagration. How disgusting: without any public debate.
And all for what? For US Oil interests? Satisfaction of Bush's cowboy mentality?
So what can Europe do about this? Last February Angela Merkel, the chancellor, refused to make Schroder's mistake of being hostile to the US by accepting that there might be violence against Iran as a last resort - here opposing her foreign minister, the suave and popular Frank Steinmeier, who is a social democrat. In her visit to Washington last week she appeared to have changed her mind, and was totally opposed to a strike. She was unable to get a guarantee from Bush however. (He was denied his backrub.) Let us hope that she manages to create a united front against a strike among EU politicians when they convene at the general affairs council of January 23. They must put the pressure on Blair and ask: are you with us or, disastrously again, with the Americans?