Michael Klare, professor of peace studies at Hampshire College, is worried about the administration's "diplomatic" bullying of Iran and the ominous accumulation of US military force near the Persian Gulf.
The United States has made vague promises of improved relations if and when Iran terminates its nuclear program, but the full burden of making initial concessions falls on Tehran. ...President Bush keeps insisting that he would like to see these "diplomatic” endeavors — as he describes them — succeed, but he has yet to bring up a single proposal or incentive that might offer any realistic prospect of eliciting a positive Iranian response. And so, knowing that his “diplomatic” efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has “tried everything”; that “his patience has run out”; and that he can “no longer risk the security of the American people” by “indulging in further fruitless negotiations,” thereby allowing the Iranians “to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making,” and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz — and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well — will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs [Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles] and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.
Seymour Hersh has been warning of this for some time.
Tom Englehardt summarizes likely consequences of a US attack on Iran here.
...to anyone not delusional -- which leaves out you-know-who and his Vice President -- a massive air assault on Iran, surely involving bunker-busting missiles with staggering explosive power, would seem to be an act of madness. It would be immensely destructive to Iran (and yet almost surely a rallying point for its fundamentalist regime); bloody in its repercussions for the U.S. (especially our troops in Iraq); imperiling to U.S, allies in the region; and, for the global economy, a potential energy catastrophe. A series of explosive events -- some thoroughly unexpected and so never war-gamed by U.S. military strategists -- could unravel the oil heartlands of the planet, making the administration's last several years in Iraq little more than an hors d'oeuvre before a banquet of catastrophe. The decision to attack Iran would be the equivalent of setting off an advanced IED directly under the main highway of what's left of global order.
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