I believe Iran may very well "attack" us first. Why do I put that in quotation marks? Because it won't really happen. But the administration will have us believe it happened. They can't convince us with a PowerPoint show like they did with Iraq, because that won't work this time.
Bush badly wants a war with Iran. He's a gambler, and he lost his first bet. He's not about to go out when he's behind. Now it's double or nothing.
Seymour Hersh, with the paragraph that troubled me the most from his piece in the New Yorker this week:
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."
(Aside: Wow, I literally just heard a fighter jet go past my window. Must have been for a Red Sox game, but nevertheless it sets the tone pretty well for me.)
Hersh is backed up by national security blogger William M. Arkin, who writes for the Washington Post today:
What is happening now, though, is not just an administration prudently preparing for the unfortunate against an aggressive and crazed state; it is also aggressive and crazed, driven by groupthink and a closed circle of bears.
The public needs to know first, that this planning includes preemptive plans that the President could approve and implement with 12 hours notice. Congress should take notice of the fact that there is a real war plan -- CONPLAN 8022 -- and it could be implemented tomorrow.
Second, the public needs to know that the train has left the station on bigger war planning, that a ground war -- despite the Post claim yesterday that a land invasion "is not contemplated" -- is also being prepared. It is a real war plan; I've heard CONPLAN 1025.
So the motive is there and the planning is there. But how to get it started with all your political capital going up in smoke on the streets of Baghdad? First off, you don't need to ask Congress, because they've already given you a blank check in the "war on terror". You can expand that anywhere you like if you can tie it in any way to terror. Iran's got some Arabs or Persians or something, and it's next to Iraq, and it's spelled very similarly, so that ought to be close enough.
But how to get the people and the international community behind you on it? You've got no credibility after the Iraq debacle, so you won't be able to show people gray boxes in satellite reconnaissance photos and posit that they're carrying nuclear material here and there.
So what's left? Dupe Iran into doing something that could be seen as a provocation. "Hey, we were attacked. We have the right to defend ourselves." Why do I think Bush would do that? He suggested exactly that in the runup to the Iraq war, but never needed to pull it out:
"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the [British] memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
I don't want to engage in any "wild speculation", as Scott McClellan would say (eight times in the same gaggle yesterday), but when Iran launches some sort of "attack" on a U.S. ship in the Strait of Hormuz, will it be real, or will a U.S. ship sort of "get in the way" of something like this (from the Tehran Times, which is actually sort of funny to read because of the melodramatic tone used in an ostensible news story, right from the first rather hilarious sentence):
Iran has military equipment enemies do not know about: general
TEHRAN - Iran possesses military equipment which the enemies do not know about and if they do learn about them they will not believe it, Chairman of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff Major General Hossein Firuzabadi said on Monday.
Speaking on the sidelines of a ceremony held to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the martyrdom of Lt. General Ali Sayyad Shirazi, he said that the message of the week-long "Great Prophet" (S) military exercises, held in the Persian Gulf from March 31 to April 6, was peace and friendship for the entire world. [...]
The significance of the war games was the fact that advanced domestically manufactured military equipment was used to display Iran's military capabilities to the world, he added.
What was displayed in the military maneuvers was only a small part of Iran's military equipment, he added.
Before the war games, the United States claimed that a military option was open to deal with Iran, but after Iran's show of force they changed their position 180 degrees by declaring that U.S. military forces are only in the Persian Gulf to protect ships that cross the Strait of Hormuz.
Well, all you've got to do is turn a military exercise like this into the real thing by veering off course a little, and ... Dingg! You've got yourself a U.S.S. Maine, a Lusitania.
I'm just saying, when Iran "attacks" us, you might take it with a grain of salt. Express skepticism, of course, and you'll be called unpatriotic and soft on defense. It's the perfect ruse if they can pull it off.
It's sad to have to suspect your own government of fabricating this kind of thing, especially when it means you might have to believe something Iran, not exactly a bastion of veracity itself, says.
But - that's where we're at.