Turn on the television, check out the front page of any major daily, listen to the radio and you'll no doubt see, read or hear a story about Iran. The Islamic Republic is dominating the news in a way that is all too eerily reminiscent of the invasion of it s neighbor Iraq a mere 3 years ago. As if the nuclear issue hadn't produced its fair share of controversy, there has been no shortage in the past few weeks of disturbing Iranian involvement in world affairs: the training and arming of Iraqi Shiite militias, its support of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the war proxy war with Israel last summer, its pledge of millions of dollars to the financially imperiled Hamas, its harboring of radical Iraqi Shiite clerics and other terrorist masterminds, its nascent bond with Hugo Chavez and the emergence of an oil-rich counterweight to US foreign policy and of course its clandestine nuclear program that the West claims is being used as a guise to develop
the bomb.
I organized a lecture last December by a noted MIT scholar from the Center for International Studies, Dr. John Tirman, for the
Sidney-Pacific Lecture series that was titled "The Next Gulf War" (see the full text
here). Dr. Tirman claims that a war, being once described famously as "politics by other means", is already underway between the United States and Iran. This has perhaps been most apparent recently in the US raid of the Iranian consulate in Irbil, a town in the northern Kurdish part of Iraq, and the Iranian response to
ambush the Karbala provincial headquarters and kill 5 American soldiers in a brazen and professionally planned attack. The US responded yesterday morning through the
bombing of an Iranian military bus that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards in the southeastern city of Zahedan by a Baluchi, an incident attributed to ethnic strife that no doubt the US has been fomenting all along to destabilize the Iranian government. I would agree with Dr. Tirman's analysis and feel that all-out military confrontation is becoming ever apparent when considering the most latest sequence of events. President Bush asserted in a
Wednesday interview that he was certain that the Iranian government was behind the supplying of explosively formed penetrators (E.F.Ps) to Iraqi Shiite militants that had been responsible for the killing of 170 soldiers. Knowing that congress will never authorize another war, President Bush is trying to sow the motives for an Iranian invasion by tying it to the Iraq war for which he received congressional authorization back in 2002 and is using the Irainan meddling in Iraq as justification for retaliation, this is an idea that is also shared by Paul Krugman in his
most recent editorial in the NY Times. With Ahmadinejad weakened domestically, as evidenced by the trumping of his supporters in the most recent Iranian elections, President Bush feels the time is right for an invasion with an Iranian populace showing unrest with the theocratic regime over the stagnant economy and the international isolation owing to the nuclear dispute. A war with Iran would be disastrous in many ways and would exacerbate tremendously the instability in the region, and I don't understand the logic in it but President Bush, being a lame duck president with no re-election prospects, and a messianic belief of himself believes that the most significant obstacle standing in his way of full and long term transformation of the Middle East is the Islamic Republic who for almost three decades has seriously impeded and to a certain extent foiled the United States attempt to transform the Middle East. I predict war by sometime this summer.