The New Yorker magazine reported yesterday that Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, had a conversation with a member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him that "instructions" had been passed on from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day.
"It will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects, writes Rubin, "It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."
The onslaught has already begun on Fox News with both the FOX & Friends and Hannity & Colmes shows devoting extensive segments to discussions on attacking Iran.
The former show featured arch Neocon, Weekly Standard Editor and PNAC Chairman Bill Kristol who gave not one but two reasons for bombing Iran. Kristol stated that the US will have to take action either to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program or in order to quell alleged support of Iraqi insurgents by Iranian forces.
"We may have to do more to stop Iran, at least with respect to Iraq, leave aside the nuclear program." Kristol stated.
He neglected to mention the fact that Iranian support of Iraqi insurgents has not been verified by any intelligence and has been flatly refuted by the Iranian government. In addition it is so called "Al Qaeda affiliated insurgent groups" that the U.S. government is openly funding and supporting in order to carry out bombings in Iran and destabilize Ahmadinejad's power base.
The Iranian government is also diplomatically allied to the current Iraqi government, where as the Neocon White House has recently been implicated in the actual overthrow and replacement of the Iraqi administration.
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Later the same evening Hannity and Colmes featured Michael Ledeen whom Hannity announced as one of his favourite authors, calling his newest book on how Iran needs to be attacked "terrific".
Ledeen spouted that "It could be almost any day now where we have two terrible choices to make, do we accept the existence of a nuclear Iran, with all that implies or do we attack them militarily, which is also a terrible choice."
Hannity then suggested that there is a modicum of gender inequality in Iran, as if that provides reasoning for attacking the country with military force, and stated that he "views them as the rise of Nazi-ism in our time".
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An organized mass media campaign to propagandize for a military strike on Iran mirrors exactly what happened in late 2002 in preparation for the invasion of Iraq and would be seen as par for the course in anticipation of an attack that presidential candidate Ron Paul amongst other expert observers fear will take place within 12 months.
All indications are that an attack is imminent. The London Times reported on Sunday that the Pentagon had finalized plans for a 3 day blitz designed to annihilate 1,200 targets in Iran and destroy the country's military capability. in addition President Bush has warned of the risk of a "nuclear holocaust" if the Iran is allowed to acquire nuclear capability, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has intimated that an attack is on the cards, The White House has declared the Iranian army a terrorist group, and the U.S. has stationed three aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf.
