Iran War: Yes, that's an "n", not a "q"

And you thought people were kidding with the bumper sticker that says:

Bush/Cheney '04
FOUR MORE WARS!

Not everyone thinks so:  Anti-Iran sentiment hardening fast Christian Science Monitor 07/22/04.

Iran's governing mullahs may feel uneasy at the prominent attention they are attracting in the US as the 9/11 investigations conclude.

But a bigger worry for them may well be the growing signs that the US Congress - even without the 9/11 reports of Iran's ties to Al Qaeda - is pressing for a tougher approach toward Tehran.

With US interests in a reformed Middle East as strong as ever - even with Saddam Hussein out of the picture - Iran is emerging as the new Satan for some forces in Washington. That is particularly true on Capitol Hill, where pro-Israel and anti-Iran hard-liners are calling for an Iran policy advocating regime change - much like what happened with Iraq in the late 1990s.

The problem with the scenario of invading and occupying Iran is numbers.  Not so much the numbers of countries who would oppose it.  Although that would be about 100% of the world.  As long as Ariel Sharon is prime minister of Israel, he'll support it.  Poor Tony Blair has hocked his soul so completely to Bush and Rummy that he would probably try to go along, but that might even be too much for him to swallow.

It's not even the number of Iranian troops, although that's obviously a major factor.  It's the number of American troops.  Bush 's occupation of Iraq is already straining the personnel resources of the Army in a major way.  See Steve Gilliard's Oh what lucky men they are 07/21/04.

The only way Bush and Rummy can raise the troops to invade Iran and occupy it at the level of, say Iraq - and we see how that's working out - is through a massive draft.  There's the usual talk of funding some group of exile politician scammers and embezzlers to do the dirty work for us.  But that ain't gonna happen.

There won't be any NATO troops to speak of.  Even Italy and Poland will be hesitant to sign up for this one.  Of the other countries with large armies, who's going to go in with the US?  Britain? Maybe, but only maybe.  India?  Russia? China? Vietnam?  I think no, no, no and no.

Bush is stuck with a foreign policy that basically can only be taken forward by an endless series of wars.

I don't agree with important parts of Bob Dreyfuss' analytical framework as it relates to the seriousness of the threat of transnational terrorism, which he tends to minimize.  But he's a journalist specializing in Middle East issues and Iran is particular area of his interest and expertise.  He has some useful thoughts on the subject: Iran, Again: Crisis Builds 07/19/04.

Now imagine yourself to be an Iranian mullah, sitting in your obscurantist domain. Wouldn’t you be thinking: what can I do to stop George Bush from being reelected? You would. And what you would do, most likely, is try to meddle in Iraq, in a way calculated to weaken the American position there. Only, the real result of such meddling would be to create precisely the kind of showdown between the United States and Iran that the neocons [American Iran hawks] want. They’ve been trying to provoke exactly that sort of crisis for months.

Recently, I mentioned reports that Israel is busily planning an air force raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mid-October sound like good timing to you?

Meanwhile, adding fuel to the fire is the report from the 9/11 commission that Iran somehow allowed some of the 9/11 hijackers to pass through its territory. This is a potentially explosive story. In short, what it means is that No. 2 in the Axis of Evil is now accused of both building weapons of mass destruction and supporting Al Qaeda. No matter that the terrorists who scuttled through Iran didn’t know that they were heading for the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and no matter that Iran didn’t know it either. It’s a sensational story designed to whip up American anger once again, this time directed at another oil-rich nation and enemy of Israel. All of this, of course, rests on the rather shaky assumption that we believe what our ever-omnipotent and omniscient intelligence agencies tell us.