Iran War: Not looking good...

"God may smile on us, but I don't think so." - anonymous Pentagon adviser quoted by Seymour Hersh April 2006 on Bush administration plans to pressure Iran militarily

I've been using that quote from an earlier Sy Hersh article about plans to attack Iran.  Now he has a new one out, with the discouraging message that the Cheneyites are pressing full-bore for war on Iran:  Watching Lebanon: Washington’s interests in Israel’s war New Yorker 08/21/06 issue; article dated 08/14/06; accessed 08/13/06.  I've quoted from it at some length in a post at The Blue Voice which I subtitled Yes, Virginia, Cheney intends to have an Iran War.

I won't repeat all of it here.  But Hersh's article backs up the reporting of Gareth Porter and others that the Cheney-Bush administration views the Israeli war on Hizbullah and Lebanon as a preliminary operation to an attack on Iran.  Hizbullah is seen as a proxy of Iran that would be willing to carry out attacks on Israel on orders from Teheran.  Damaging Hizbullah, in this view, is a way of depriving Iran of some of its "strategic depth".   Hersh writes:

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

Hersh also tells us that in planning to expand the Iraq War to Iran, the Cheney-Bush administration is sticking to its well-known modus operandi:

The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top - at the insistence of the White House - and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely," he said. "It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out," he said. "Cheney had a strong hand in this."

This means, among other things, that they are confident that the mainstream media will play along with them as submissively and irresponsibly as they did in the runup to the Iraq War.

But media cheeerleaders notwithstanding, expanding the war to Iran will be a dark, highly risky turn in American policy.