Another War Plan

Could it be happening again? Is it possible that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are buying into faulty information on Iraq, listening to would-be-powerful exiles who really don't know their ass from a hole in the ground? Looks like it might be possible. Thank God we don't really have the resources (see a couple of posts below this one) to start a whole new war in Iran or we probably would have started bombing some time ago.

Are you familiar with the expression, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail?" One might extrapolate from this, in the Bush/Cheney mindset, if all you've got is a bomb, every problem begins to look like a target.

The Center for American Progress reports on the situation in their daily newsletter, The Progress Report, as follows...

INTELLIGENCE -- MCCLATCHY REPORTERS WARN OF FAULTY IRAN INTELLIGENCE: McClatchy reporters Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott wrote Saturday about "an echo of the intelligence wars that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq," as administration hard-liners "have tried recently to portray Iran's nuclear program as more advanced than it is." Editor & Publisher noted that "reports from Strobel, Walcott and others in the former [Knight-Ridder] Washington office, proved more
skeptical and accurate than those from other leading news organizations in the pre-Iraq invasion push." The reporters wrote that officials from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department suspect Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld "may be receiving a stream of questionable information" from a discredited Iranian exile. The "dubious information may include claims that Iran directed Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, to kidnap two Israeli soldiers in July; that Iran's nuclear program is moving faster than generally believed; and that the Iranian people are eager to join foreign efforts to overthrow their theocratic rulers. ... The officials said there is no reliable intelligence to support any of those assertions and some that contradicts all three." Several former defense officials have also said "they've they've been told that plans for airstrikes -- if Bush deems them necessary -- are being updated." According to one U.S. counterterrorism official, "It seems like Iran is becoming the new Iraq."