A somewhat misleading Time article on war with Iran does make the point that preparations for war are advancing. An example of the misleading:
There is circumstantial evidence that Iran ordered Hizballah to provoke this summer's war, in part to demonstrate that Tehran can stir up big trouble if pushed to the brink. The precise extent of coordination between Hizballah and Tehran is unknown.There is no evidence Iran provoked and urged the Lebanon war and analysts don't believe that. Some hard right Israelis have been using that argument to urge the US to attack Iran, much like some hard right warhawks in the administration were urging Israel to attack Syria in addition to Hizballah this summer.
The real point of this article and similar articles appearing recently in the Israeli press is this line: "That red line, experts say, could be just a year away." The war on Iran will happen because Bush will say he only had a short time to act before it was too late. I will write now even more emphatically than I wrote about Bush's "pressing" reasons for invading Iraq - This is Total Bullshit.
Why are Israel and American warhawks pressing for the US to attack Iran within months? Because they will never get a better chance than with this President now. Because they have expanded their Iranian target list to over 1500 targets which is well beyond the Israeli Air Force capabilities. Because they are terrified someone besides Israel in the Middle East will have the bomb. For these reasons they are changing the storyline from "there is a likelihood of Iran getting the bomb in around 10 years" to "Iran must be stopped in less than a year."
Another interesting detail that was false in Time's story - Iran's "aging but possibly still effective air defenses." Iran has been rapidly upgrading with expensive and effective Soviet systems. Why the mistake? Let me take you into the world of disinfo.
Reading Time is sometimes like searching for clues as to what some highly placed people want you to think. Since World War 2 Time has many contacts with American intelligence. At times, they could even be called part of the CIA propaganda branch. So is this story evidence that some people want Time readers to think this will be an easy air war while warning of possible Iranian counter-measures? I think it is easiest to take the whole story almost at face value but designed to stress that something must be done very soon. There are many reporters and they all got part of the story - one or more got misleading information on Iranian air defenses and that Iran urged Hizballah's war this summer - which was a war Israeli had been planning for a year. The Hizballah kidnapping provided the excuse. Who slipped the one year deadline into the story is the most important part and it would be interesting to know who that was.
So overall the story urges only a few months for diplomacy to work and implies an easy air campaign while preparing the public for an unpredictable mess afterwards.
The conclusion has the truest words in the article.
Unless the U.S., its allies and Iran can find a way to make diplomacy work, the whispers of blockades and minesweepers in the Persian Gulf may soon be drowned out by the cries of war. And if the U.S. has learned anything over the past five years, it's that war in the Middle East rarely goes according to plan.This is another link using that odd Time proxy server.
2 comments:
How can you say there was no Irainian involment in Lebanon when Iranian missles were used on Israel and Iranian consultants were found there?
Anonymous, a frequent poster, can't read.
Iran did not urge or provoke the war, which is the warhawk accusation. Iran does supply training, equipment and consultants.
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