I'd like to pimp
pontificator's recent diary,
More Evidence of A Coming War with Iran? (which seemed to slip mostly unnoticed into the Friday night ether), since I think this is a pretty important little story that seems, oddly, to have not been picked up much in the blogosphere.
According to this UPI story from Wednesday, "USAF playing cat and mouse game over Iran", the coming war with Iran that Hersh describes may in fact have already begun, in much the same way the Iraq war was up and running well before "Shock 'n Awe" of March 2003:
The U.S. Air Force is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Iran's ayatollahs, flying American combat aircraft into Iranian airspace in an attempt to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars, thus allowing U.S. pilots to grid the system for use in future targeting data, administration officials said.
"We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.
More below...
The flights, which have been going on for weeks, are being launched from sites in Afghanistan and Iraq and are part of Bush administration attempts collect badly needed intelligence on Iran's possible nuclear weapons development sites, these sources said, speaking on condition of strict anonymity.
"These Iranian air defense positions are not just being observed, they're being 'templated,'" an administration official said, explaining that the flights are part of a U.S. effort to develop "an electronic order of battle for Iran" in case of actual conflict.
The author of the piece is Richard Sale, UPI's "Intelligence Correspondent" and author of another alarming recent piece along similar lines, "U.S. mulls strikes on Syria", and older articles on Chalabi's possible role funnelling intelligence to Iran; a US raid into Syria back in 2003 that apparently killed 80 people (I don't remember even hearing about that at all); the FBI's probe into the DoD's shadowy Office of Special Plans; and the CIA's role in creating Saddam back in 1959. His sources seem to be ex-intelligence types of the kind now very much on the outs with the current regime ("agency pissants," as one of Hersh's scary DoD sources calls them), including Vince Cannistraro, former CIA counter-intelligence chief and no friend of the Bushies (and a source for Hersh as well). All of which suggests that Sale doesn't seem to be a White House mouthpiece, despite his employment by the Washington Times/Sun Myung Moon-owned UPI.
The way I read this article, these flights have two purposes, one stated and the other implied. The first is to test and map out Iran's defenses in preparation for our next oh-so-reluctant bloody imperial adventure. The second, it seems to me, is even more insidious. Here's another ex-CIA type in the article on the possible repercussions of these flights:
Ellen Laipson, president and CEO of the Henry L. Stimson Center and former CIA Middle East expert, said of the flights, "They are not necessarily an act of war in themselves, unless they are perceived as being so by the country that is being overflown."
Laipson explained: "It's not unusual for countries to test each other's air defenses from time to time, to do a little probing -- but it can be dangerous if the target country believes that such flights could mean an imminent attack."
She said her concern was that Iran "will not only turn on its air defense radars but use them to fire missiles at U.S. aircraft," an act which would "greatly increase tensions" between the two countries.
Who among us doubts, given Cheney's recent rantings, that the Bushies want Iran to perceive that such flights are part of a bigger, forthcoming attack? The positive geopolitical spin on this thinking is that they want to cow the Iranians into submission with some aggressive (but ultimately toothless) sabre-rattling. The scarier possibility (and the one the general level of insanity of this regime leads me to suspect), is that they're actually trying to goad the Iranians into shooting down one of our fighter planes. That was apparently one of the strategies employed in the run-up to the Iraq war, and as we know from the USS Maine and the Tonkin Gulf, it's a strategy with a distinguished precedent in American history when a President wants a war but needs a propaganda pretext.
These insane bastards want Iran to blow up an American pilot so that Fox and the wingnuts can roar into action, screaming that "the Iranians started it and now we have to finish it," or some such test-marketed, testosterone-fueled phrase. And then we're off the the races. Again.
I'm too numb to even really be horrified anymore.
Update [2005-1-29 16:19:39 by WendellGee]: Another diary on this from roseeriter: Isn't this How It Started in Iraq?