Fishing for a Pretext to Squeeze Iran
By Juan Cole

Iran threatened last week to use the oil weapon if the United Nations Security Council imposes sanctions on the country because of its nuclear research program, promising “harm and pain” to the United States. In addition to consumer anxieties about oil prices, rumors of a planned U.S. or Israeli airstrike on Iran keep flying, and neighboring Iraqi Shiites have threatened reprisals if that is done to their brethren. What is driving the crisis between the Bush administration and Iran and ratcheting up the rhetoric?

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Will We Fight Iran?

Will we fight Iran? Another way to ask the question is: Will it be a war of choice? In other words, will war happen because we want it, and freely decide that this is the best outcome of policies we have approved? Or instead, will relentless stories -- iron narratives already in place -- force our hand? This is what happened in August 1914.

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Logic out the window at the White House

The biggest pitfall in predicting the behavior of radical groups like the inner circle of the Bush administration is that you keep telling yourself that they would never actually do whatever it is they’re talking about. Surely they must realize that acting like that would cause a disaster. Then they go right ahead and do it. “(The Iranians) must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means,” U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told a group of visiting British politicians last week. “We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down.” In other words, he was calmly proposing an illegal attack on a sovereign state, possibly involving nuclear weapons. Bolton knew his words would be leaked, so maybe it was just deliberate posturing to raise the pressure on Iran. But on Sunday, addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, Bolton repeated the threat: “The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve… We must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat…” He may really mean it -- and no one in the White House has told him to shut up.

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Unleashing Armageddon: What Then?

I want to discuss in some detail the propaganda campaign now being waged with regard to both Iran and Syria, as well as the ideological frame of reference that underlies the particular manner in which that campaign is being and has been conducted. I will address the nature and strategy of this campaign -- how such a campaign was waged with regard to Iraq, and how a similar campaign is now underway with regard to Iran and Syria (and has been for some time) -- in subsequent essays here. But I will begin by starting at the end.

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Is Another 9/11 in the Works?

If you were President George W. Bush with all available US troops tied down by the Iraqi resistance, and you were unable to control Iraq or political developments in the country, would you also start a war with Iran? Yes, you would.

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