As Condi Rice imposes further sanctions on Iran, robert fox believes war is getting closer |
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Once America's cowboys have talked their crazy talk, they have to walk their crazy walk," concludes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times about the likelihood that the neo-cons are about to stage their last hurrah and attack Iran.
Everything I hear from the United States - especially from military sources - leads to the same conclusion. When Cheney and Bush say they are not going to leave office having allowed Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs to go nuclear on their watch, they mean it.
John Bolton (right), Bush's never-confirmed former Ambassador to the UN, has been plugging the 'not on our watch' message in a series of promotional broadcasts for his new book. Less noisily in the background, both Bush and Cheney have spoken in the past week of needing to do something about Iran.
The most worrying forecast comes from two highly placed, and highly reliable, British |
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| Both Bush and Cheney have spoken in the past week of needing to do something about Iran |
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military contacts of mine who have been meeting their counterparts in the US. They point to serious reflection in the upper tiers of the US command about how things went wrong in Iraq, and implicitly how they will go wrong again if Bush and Cheney pursue Iran with the same gun-slinging approach.
Generals including Chiarelli, Casey, Sanchez and Abizaid now question the whole concept of the operation in Iraq; even the current US commander, Gen David Petraeus, believes brute military force is not enough.
"The trouble is that when these men's views are expressed in Administration circles, they have no effect," a senior British officer told me. Bush's most trusted advisors are not serving or recently serving officers - but the long-retired 'grey-beard' generals still immersed in yesterday's gun-slinging culture. "That's why I think they'll bomb Iran," said my source. "It's odds on."
As for the commander of our destiny in Downing Street? He's following the guerrilla tactics of Tar Baby in the Brer Rabbit story - lyin' low and sayin' nuffin. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 26, 2007
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Iran: round up the usual hawks
The US sets its sights on Iran
The war of misdirection
