Starting a war with Iran?

[snopes]

I'm concerned about the disadvantaged of our country and the oppressed of our world as well. I just don't think the Democrats have a monopoloy on this concern and caring.

For your information Aox, I'm constantly bickering with my brother who is a coolaid-drinking Republican and quotes Rush Limbaugh daily.

My point is that I don't much care for coolaid drinkers from either side, and from what I've seen of your posts, you're merely the Democrat version of my older brother.

[aoxamaxoa]

quote:Originally posted by snopes

I'm concerned about the disadvantaged of our country and the oppressed of our world as well. I just don't think the Democrats have a monopoloy on this concern and caring.

For your information Aox, I'm constantly bickering with my brother who is a coolaid-drinking Republican and quotes Rush Limbaugh daily.

My point is that I don't much care for coolaid drinkers from either side, and from what I've seen of your posts, you're merely the Democrat version of my older brother.

Oh, it's election time and I love druming up anger from republijerks.

You are ot. The point of this thread is Nuclear war is becoming very likely.

I am a fiscal conservative and a bit rad when it comes to koolaid...... Not to worry yourself about my rants.

[aoxamaxoa]

Daniel Ellsberg, a former official in the State and Defense departments who released the Pentagon Papers, is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

This originally appeared in Harpers.

Daniel Ellsberg: The Next War

by Daniel Ellsberg

A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964, the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a disastrous war might have been averted entirely.

My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war. His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president sought "no wider war" and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in "retaliation" for the "unequivocal," "unprovoked" attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers "on routine patrol" in "international waters."

Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first installment, published by The New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate deception.

When we met in September, Morse had just heard me mention to an audience that all of that evidence of fraud had been in my own Pentagon safe at the time of the Tonkin Gulf vote. (By coincidence, I had started work as a special assistant to an assistant secretary of defense the day of the alleged attack -- which had not, in fact, occurred at all.) After my talk, Morse, who had been a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1964, said to me, "If you had given those documents to me at the time, the Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if it had somehow been brought up on the floor of the Senate for a vote, it would never have passed."

He was telling me, it seemed, that it had been in my power, seven years earlier, to avert the deaths so far of 50,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, with many more to come. It was not something I was eager to hear. After all, I had just been indicted on what eventually were twelve federal felony counts, with a possible sentence of 115 years in prison, for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public. I had consciously accepted that prospect in some small hope of shortening the war. Morse was saying that I had missed a real opportunity to prevent the war altogether.

My first reaction was that Morse had overestimated the significance of the Tonkin Gulf resolution and, therefore, the alleged consequences of my not blocking it in August. After all, I felt, Johnson would have found another occasion to get such a resolution passed, or gone ahead without one, even if someone had exposed the fraud in early August.

Years later, though, the thought hit me: What if I had told Congress and the public, later in the fall of 1964, the whole truth about what was coming, with all the documents I had acquired in my job by September, October, or November? Not just, as Morse had suggested, the contents of a few files on the events surrounding the Tonkin Gulf incident -- all that I had in early August -- but the drawerfuls of critical working papers, memos, estimates, and detailed escalation options revealing the evolving plans of the Johnson Administration for a wider war, expected to commence soon after the election. In short, what if I had put out before the end of the year, whether before or after the November election, all of the classified papers from that period that I did eventually disclose in 1971?

Had I done so, the public and Congress would have learned that Johnson's campaign theme, "we seek no wider war," was a hoax. They would have learned, in fact, that the Johnson Administration had been heading in secret toward essentially the same policy of expanded war that his presidential rival, Senator Barry Goldwater, openly advocated -- a policy that the voters overwhelmingly repudiated at the polls.

I would have been indicted then, as I was seven years later, and probably imprisoned. But America would have been at peace during those years. It was only with that reflection, perhaps a decade after the carnage finally ended, that I recognized Morse had been right about my personal share of responsibility for the whole war.

Not just mine alone. Any one of a hundred officials -- some of whom foresaw the whole catastrophe -- could have told the hidden truth to Congress, with documents. Instead, our silence made us all accomplices in the ensuing slaughter.

* * *

The run-up to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution was almost exactly parallel to the run-up to the 2002 Iraq war resolution.

In both cases, the president and his top Cabinet officers consciously deceived Congress and the public about a supposed short-run threat in order to justify and win support for carrying out preexisting offensive plans against a country that was not a near-term danger to the United States. In both cases, the deception was essential to the political feasibility of the program precisely because expert opinion inside the government foresaw costs, dangers, and low prospects of success that would have doomed the project politically if there had been truly informed public discussion beforehand. And in both cases, that necessary deception could not have succeeded without the obedient silence of hundreds of insiders who knew full well both the deception and the folly of acting upon it.

One insider aware of the Iraq plans, and knowledgeable about the inevitably disastrous result of executing those plans, was Richard Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for George W. Bush and adviser to three presidents before him. He had spent September 11, 2001, in the White House, coordinating the nation's response to the attacks. He reports in his memoir, Against All Enemies, discovering the next morning, to his amazement, that most discussions there were about attacking Iraq.

Clarke told Bush and Rumsfeld that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, or with its perpetrator, Al Qaeda. As Clarke said to Secretary of State Colin Powell that afternoon, "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response -- which Rumsfeld was already urging -- would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor."

Actually, Clarke foresaw that it would be much worse than that. Attacking Iraq not only would be a crippling distraction from the task of pursuing the real enemy but would in fact aid that enemy: "Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."

I single out Clarke -- by all accounts among the best of the best of public servants -- only because of his unique role in counterterrorism and because, thanks to his illuminating 2004 memoir, we know his thoughts at that time, and, in particular, the intensity of his anguish and frustration. Such a memoir allows us, as we read each new revelation, to ask a simple question: What difference might it have made to events if he had told us this at the time?

Clarke was not, of course, the only one who could have told us, or told Congress. We know from other accounts that both of his key judgments -- the absence of linkage between Al Qaeda and Saddam and his correct prediction that "attacking Iraq would actually make America less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist movement" -- were shared by many professionals in the CIA, the State Department, and the military.

Yet neither of these crucial, expert conclusions was made available to Congress or the public, by Clarke or anyone else, in the eighteen-month run-up to the war. Even as they heard the president lead the country to the opposite, false impressions, toward what these officials saw as a disastrous, unjustified war, they felt obliged to keep their silence.

Costly as their silence was to their country and its victims, I feel I know their mind-set. I had long prized my own identity as a keeper of the president's secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred to me to break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in the Marines, at the Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although I already knew the Vietnam War was a mistake and based on lies, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president (and to my promises of secrecy, on which my own career as a president's man depended). I'm not proud that it took me years of war to awaken to the higher loyalties owed by every government official to the rule of law, to our soldiers in harm's way, to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to the Constitution, which every one of us had sworn an oath "to support and uphold."

It took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we had signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the Constitution. That conflict arose almost daily, unnoticed by me or other officials, whenever we were secretly aware that the president or other executive officers were lying to or misleading Congress. In giving priority, in effect, to my promise of secrecy -- ignoring my constitutional obligation -- I was no worse or better than any of my Vietnam-era colleagues, or those who later saw the Iraq war approaching and failed to warn anyone outside the executive branch.

Ironically, Clarke told Vanity Fair in 2004 that in his own youth he had ardently protested "the complete folly" of the Vietnam War and that he "wanted to get involved in national security in 1973 as a career so that Vietnam didn't happen again." He is left today with a sense of failure:

It's an arrogant thing to think, Could I have ever stopped another Vietnam? But it really filled me with frustration that when I saw Iraq coming I wasn't able to do anything. After having spent thirty years in national security and having been in some senior-level positions you would think that I might be able to have some influence, some tiny influence. But I couldn't have any.

But it was not too arrogant, I believe, for Clarke to aspire to stop this second Vietnam personally. He actually had a good chance to do so, throughout 2002, the same one Senator Morse had pointed out to me.

Instead of writing a memoir to be cleared for publication in 2004, a year after Iraq had been invaded, Clarke could have made his knowledge of the war to come, and its danger to our security, public before the war. He could have supported his testimony with hundreds of files of documents from his office safe and computer, to which he then still had access. He could have given these to both the media and the then Democratic-controlled Senate.

"If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant" in the summer of 2002, Clarke told Larry King in March 2004, "I would have been fired within an hour." That is undoubtedly true. But should that be the last word on that course? To be sure, virtually all bureaucrats would agree with him, as he told King, that his only responsible options at that point were either to resign quietly or to "spin" for the White House to the press, as he did. But that is just the working norm I mean to question here.

His unperceived alternative, I wish to suggest, was precisely to court being fired for telling the truth to the public, with documentary evidence, in the summer of 2002. For doing that, Clarke would not only have lost his job, his clearance, and his career as an executive official; he would almost surely have been prosecuted, and he might have gone to prison. But the controversy that ensued would not have been about hindsight and blame. It would have been about whether war on Iraq would make the United States safer, and whether it was otherwise justified.

That debate did not occur in 2002 -- just as a real debate about war in Vietnam did not occur in 1964 -- thanks to the disciplined reticence of Clarke and many others. Whatever his personal fate, which might have been severe, his disclosures would have come before the war. Perhaps, instead of it.

* * *

We face today a crisis similar to those of 1964 and 2002, a crisis hidden once again from the public and most of Congress. Articles by Seymour Hersh and others have revealed that, as in both those earlier cases, the president has secretly directed the completion, though not yet execution, of military operational plans -- not merely hypothetical "contingency plans" but constantly updated plans, with movement of forces and high states of readiness, for prompt implementation on command -- for attacking a country that, unless attacked itself, poses no threat to the United States: in this case, Iran.

According to these reports, many high-level officers and government officials are convinced that our president will attempt to bring about regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice president have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so than they were to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense is as madly optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military success there as he was in Iraq.

Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney's office had directed contingency planning for "a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons" and that "several senior Air Force officers" involved in the planning were "appalled at the implications of what they are doing -- that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack -- but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objection."

Several of Hersh's sources have confirmed both the detailed operational planning for use of nuclear weapons against deep underground Iranian installations and military resistance to this prospect, which led several senior officials to consider resigning. Hersh notes that opposition by the Joint Chiefs in April led to White House withdrawal of the "nuclear option" -- for now, I would say. The operational plans remain in existence, to be drawn upon for a "decisive" blow if the president deems it necessary.

Many of these sources regard the planned massive air attack -- with or without nuclear weapons -- as almost sure to be catastrophic for the Middle East, the position of the United States in the world, our troops in Iraq, the world economy, and U.S. domestic security. Thus they are as deeply concerned about these prospects as many other insiders were in the year before the Iraq invasion. That is why, unlike in the lead-up to Vietnam or Iraq, some insiders are leaking to reporters. But since these disclosures -- so far without documents and without attribution -- have not evidently had enough credibility to raise public alarm, the question is whether such officials have yet reached the limit of their responsibilities to our country.

Assuming Hersh's so-far anonymous sources mean what they say -- that this is, as one puts it, "a juggernaut that has to be stopped" -- I believe it is time for one or more of them to go beyond fragmentary leaks unaccompanied by documents. That means doing what no other active official or consultant has ever done in a timely way: what neither Richard Clarke nor I nor anyone else thought of doing until we were no longer officials, no longer had access to current documents, after bombs had fallen and thousands had died, years into a war. It means going outside executive channels, as officials with contemporary access, to expose the president's lies and oppose his war policy publicly before the war, with unequivocal evidence from inside.

Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political responsibilities of officials rightly "appalled" by the thrust of secret policy. I hope that one or more such persons will make the sober decision -- accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk of prison -- to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably, official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of the military plans being considered. What needs disclosure is the full internal controversy, the secret critiques as well as the arguments and claims of advocates of war and nuclear "options" -- the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East. But unlike in 1971, the ongoing secret debate should be made available before our war in the region expands to include Iran, before the sixty-one-year moratorium on nuclear war is ended violently, to give our democracy a chance to foreclose either of those catastrophes.

The personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not as great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily of over 130,000 young Americans -- with many yet to join them -- in an unjust war. Our country has urgent need for comparable courage, moral and civil courage, from its public servants. They owe us the truth before the next war begins.

[aoxamaxoa]

More on the Bushevik Colossal Blunder in Revealing Nuclear Secrets to Terrorists. Some Pundits are Saying It is so Egregious, It Must be Part of the Plot to Have an Excuse for Bombing Iran. But, I Can't Figure That One Out. It Just Appears That The Bush Administration Compromised the Nuclear Security of the World Out of Sheer Stupidity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03documents.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin


http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20061103-030156-6711r



"If Democrats had done that there would be mobs carrying torches in the streets tonight.
The Democrats would be accused of treason and there would be calls for resignation."

[aoxamaxoa]

and this...

"The alleged Iranian threat espoused by Bush is based on fear, and arises from a combination of ignorance and ideological inflexibility."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061120/ritter/3

"Of course, Rice would need to come with a revamped US policy, one that rejects regime change, provides security guarantees for Iran as it is currently governed and would be willing to recognize Iran's legitimate right to enrich uranium under Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (although under stringent UN inspections, and perhaps limited to the operation of a single 164-centrifuge cascade)."

[aoxamaxoa]

Israel has plans for nuclear strike on Iran
Sat Jan 6, 2007 11:20 PM GMT

LONDON (Reuters) - Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons, the Sunday Times newspaper said.

Citing what it said were several Israeli military sources, the paper said two Israeli air force squadrons had been training to blow up an enrichment plant in Natanz using low-yield nuclear "bunker busters".

Two other sites, a heavy water plant at Arak and a uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, would be targeted with conventional bombs, the Sunday Times said.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously last month to slap sanctions on Iran to try to stop uranium enrichment that Western powers fear could lead to making bombs. Tehran insists its plans are peaceful and says it will continue enrichment.

Israel has refused to rule out pre-emptive military action against Iran along the lines of its 1981 air strike against an atomic reactor in Iraq, though many analysts believe Iran's nuclear facilities are too much for Israel to take on alone.

The newspaper said the Israeli plan envisaged conventional laser-guided bombs opening "tunnels" into the targets. Nuclear warheads would then be used fired into the plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce radioactive fallout.

Israeli pilots have flown to Gibraltar in recent weeks to train for the 2,000 mile (3,200 km) round-trip to the Iranian targets, the Sunday Times said, and three possible routes to Iran have been mapped out including one over Turkey.

However it also quoted sources as saying a nuclear strike would only be used if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene. Disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, the paper added.

Washington has said military force remains an option while insisting that its priority is to reach a diplomatic solution.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, has said it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved. | Learn more about Reuters
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2535310,00.html

[aoxamaxoa]

Bush's True War Escalation Strategy - Getting from Iraq to Iran
http://www.progressivedailybeacon.com/more.php?page=opinion&id=1408

A. Alexander, January 12th, 2007

"And there it is ... the President is escalating the war now in an all out effort to make it impossible, no matter who is in power next, for the U.S. military to leave the Middle East. An attack on Iran you see, would accomplish that objective."


"Starting a war with Iran? Can Americans stop it before it is too late?"
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/InsaniToughts?id=202
"Bush received his authorization to do anything he wants in 2004. When the American public picked him as their president despite the fact that he had lied to them and had done a terrible job ever since he took office."

[aoxamaxoa]

"Exposing the U.S. Nuclear War Plan
NRDC's nuclear war simulation provides an open, independent assessment of the U.S. nuclear war plan, and shows it is a Cold War relic in need of major reform." and "After the end of the Cold War, both the United States and Russia maintain vast nuclear arsenals. The United States still has 550 ICBMs long-range missiles that can reach Moscow in a half an hour, stored in silos throughout the West. A U.S. nuclear submarine carries up to 192 warheads and could kill or maim about a some 50 million Russians. The United States has 18 of these submarines with nuclear warheads 100,000 times greater than the single Hiroshima bomb."
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nwarplan.asp
"The NRDC nuclear war plans project uses a computer simulation to reveal what nuclear conflict would look like if it occurred today. The project shows that while the Cold War is long over, American nuclear war plans have hardly changed at all. The war plan still requires some 2,600 warheads to be on alert and trained on Russian targets at all times."

Now is "Most Perilous Period Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
http://www.thebulletin.org/index.htm
"TO BE ANNOUNCED: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists will move the minute hand of the "Doomsday Clock" closer to Midnight, on January 17, 2007. This change reflects growing concerns of a "Second Nuclear Age" marked by multiple grave nuclear threats including unsecured Russian nuclear materials and the "launch-ready" status of 2,000 U.S. and Russian missles. The decision to move the minute hand is made by the Atomic Bulletin's Board of Directors and Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates."

[aoxamaxoa]

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-01-17-voa63.cfm

Atomic Scientists Warn World Moving Closer to Nuclear Doom
By Stephanie Ho
Washington


"As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on earth," he said.  "As citizens of the world, we have a duty to share that knowledge and alert the public to the unnecessary risk that we live with every day." British scientist Stephen Hawking

[aoxamaxoa]

Try to pay attention to this:

""You're talking about a war against Iran" that likely would destabilize the Middle East for years, White told the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070120/ts_nm/iran_usa_experts_dc_1

[aoxamaxoa]

U.S. warns Iran to back down

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070123/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_us_2

"In his speech outlining the (supposedly) new U.S. strategy in Iraq, President Bush promised to "seek out and destroy" Iranian networks that he said were providing "advanced weaponry and training to our enemies," Alexandra Zavis and Greg Miller report. But the Bush administration has provided scant evidence to support these claims. Nor have reporters traveling with U.S. troops seen extensive signs of Iranian involvement. "

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot-and-robert-naiman/as-bush-faces-the-nation_b_39421.html

A desperate bunch running this war while ruining the country......

[aoxamaxoa]

"Putting It on the Table: Kucinich Says Bush Risking Impeachment"

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/17800

"Kucinich: The White House Is Up To Its Old Tricks; Is Preparing the United States for an Attack on Iran : President's Actions Could Lead to Impeachment "

Who'd of thunk 7 years ago Americans would hold Dennis Kucinich in higher esteem than George Bush? Amazing!

"Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq
Administration Strategy Stirs Concern Among Some Officials"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/25/AR2007012502199.html

"With aspects of the plan also targeting Iran's influence in Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, the policy goes beyond the threats Bush issued earlier this month to "interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria" into Iraq. It also marks a departure from years past when diplomacy appeared to be the sole method of pressuring Iran to reverse course on its nuclear program."

[aoxamaxoa]

NBC NEWS confirms a secret U.S. military report that says 'Iranian Agents' may be behind a deadly ambush in Karbala, Iraq that left five American soldiers dead. The report also claims the Iranian revolutionary guard is providing intelligence on U.S. and Iraqi military to Shiite extremists, in addition to sophisticated weaponry. Developing....



http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/01/30/iraq.main/index.html

Iran involvement suspected in Karbala compound attack



BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The Pentagon is investigating whether a recent attack on a military compound in Karbala was carried out by Iranians or Iranian-trained operatives, two officials from separate U.S. government agencies said.

"People are looking at it seriously," one of the officials said.

That official added the Iranian connection was a leading theory in the investigation into the January 20 attack that killed five soldiers.

The second official said: "We believe it's possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained."

Five U.S. soldiers were killed in the sophisticated attack by men wearing U.S.-style uniforms, according to U.S. military reports. (Watch how attackers got into the compound )

Both officials stressed the Iranian-involvement theory is a preliminary view, and there is no final conclusion. They agreed this possibility is being looked at because of the sophistication of the attack and the level of coordination.

"This was beyond what we have seen militias or foreign fighters do," the second official said.

The investigation has led some officials to conclude the attack was an "inside job" -- that people inside the compound helped the attackers enter unstopped.

Investigators are looking particularly at how the attackers got U.S.-style military uniforms and SUVs similar to those used by U.S. troops.

"'Who was behind it all?' was the fundamental question," the first official said.

Some Iraqis speculate that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps carried out the attack in retaliation for the capture by U.S. forces of five of its members in Irbil, Iraq, on January 11, according to a Time.com article published Tuesday. (Read the article)

The five Iranians are still in U.S. custody.

The Bush administration has authorized U.S. forces to kill or capture Iranian agents plotting attacks in Iraq, a U.S. national security official said Friday.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has a reputation for taking harsh and unrelenting revenge on its enemies, the Time.com article says.


True?

[aoxamaxoa]

Todays Info: The Road to Armageddon

"It's an extremely dangerous situation," Bavand said. "I don't think Tehran wants war under any circumstances. But there might be an accidental event that could escalate into a large confrontation."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070131/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_war_clouds;_ylt=Aumo6Tddyv9PIKFp5zD_znGs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--

Accidental events? Interesting....

[aoxamaxoa]

Europeans fear US attack on Iran as nuclear row intensifies

· Transatlantic rift emerges over how to handle crisis
· America builds up its naval forces in the Gulf

Ian Traynor in Brussels and Jonathan Steele
Wednesday January 31, 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2002329,00.html

"The Bush administration will shortly publish a dossier of charges of alleged Iranian subversion in Iraq. "Iran has steadily ramped up its activity in Iraq in the last three to four months. This applies to the scope and pace of their operations. You could call these brazen activities," a senior US official said in London yesterday."

will it be truth or will it be fiction again?