Iran War?

Robert Dreyfuss leans toward the pessimistic when it comes to whether the Bush administration intends to go to war with Iran. In Next We Take Tehran Mother Jones July/Aug 2006, he writes:

By inaugurating a war of choice against a nation that had not attacked the United States, and by justifying his actions under a new doctrine of unilateral, preventive war, Bush shattered the U.S. establishment’s policy consensus while alienating America's closest allies, angering its rivals, and provoking a storm of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Now, like a high-stakes blackjack player doubling down, the president is letting the world know that he is ready to do it all over again in Iran. ...

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, is Moscow’s point man for the U.N. talks about Iran. After a U.N. meeting in New York earlier this year, Lavrov said bluntly: "This looks like déjà vu." Indeed, the parallels with the year before the invasion of Iraq are startling.

In addition to exaggerating the nuclear threat, the administration has been accusing Iran of harboring Al Qaeda fugitives and supporting bin Laden’s movement, though there is little or no evidence to support these claims. As in Iraq, Washington is sinking millions of dollars into propaganda efforts and alliances with dubious exile groups; according to a recent State Department planning document, the United States is busily setting up Iran intelligence and mobilization centers in Dubai, Istanbul, Frankfurt, London, and Azerbaijan to work with “Iranian expatriate communities.” Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the vice president and a top State Department official, is overseeing a program to spend $85 million on support for dissidents in Iran and to pay for anti-Iran propaganda. She has helped create a brand-new Office of Iranian Affairs at the State Department, and she reportedly supervises an office called the Iran-Syria Operations Group. As with Iraq, U.S. officials—realizing that U.N. support for an attack on Iran is nil—are talking openly about bypassing the world body and forging yet another “coalition of the willing” to confront Iran. And, of course, as with Iraq, there is the escalating rhetoric, the talk of “all options” being on the table, the news of Special Forces already operating in the country to foment civil conflict. (my emphasis)

And to paraphrase a saying Clinton's defense used in his impeachment trial, "When they say it's not about oil - it's about oil." Dreyfuss writes:

Iran is a decade away from gaining access to the bomb, according to the administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate, and despite all the talk about the ugliness of the theocratic regime in Tehran, the likely showdown is, at bottom, driven by the geopolitics of oil. With one-tenth of the world’s petroleum reserves and one-sixth of its natural gas reserves, Iran sits in a strategic geographical position that makes it the cockpit for control of the entire Middle East.

Well, oil - and the will of God. According to one of the Christian Right's leading lights: Pastor Strangelove by Sarah Posner American Prospect 06/06/06 issue.

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