By Daan de Wit
This article has been translated into English by Ben Kearney
The Bush Administration says it wants to solve the situation with Iran diplomatically. Meanwhile this series from DeepJournal is showing that behind the scenes there is little to no credibility being given to this route, and that preparations have been underway and continue to be made for a military conflict with Iran. Experts in the area of American foreign policy point to the possibility that the U.S. could provoke an incident in order to then be able to intervene militarily. From this perspective, they have their doubts about the American view of alleged Iranian interference in Iraq and even about the recent incident in which six nuclear weapons were flown over the U.S.

Earlier this month, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard - an element of the Iranian army - was declared a terrorist organization by the U.S. Congress; in response, Iran labeled the CIA and the U.S. Army terrorist organizations. The declaration by Congress is another step in the direction of an attack on Iran - this is the opinion of several experts, among them columnist Gwynne Dyer and retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner. This is the first time that a portion of a country's army as been branded as such. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard consists of 125,000 troops and 300,000 reserves.

New American stance on Iranian army increases chance of conflict
A possible scenario is that Bush now carries out a legal strike against the illegal Revolutionary Guard, which is followed by a response and which in turn can be seized upon to justify a large-scale attack. 'In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq - arming and training militants - would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories. A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armour-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured. Under the theory - which is gaining credence in Washington security circles - US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and even its armed forces', writes The Telegraph.

In late August, former CIA agent Robert Baer wrote: 'Reports that the Bush Administration will put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: it's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months'. Larisa Alexandrovna, managing editor of investigative news for The Raw Story writes: 'Experts and officials in the US military and intelligence communities read the administration's move to declare the Guard a terrorist organization as an indication that something ominous is looming over the horizon. One of the former CIA case officers interviewed for this article explained that the Office of the Vice President is making this drastic move in order to lay the groundwork for a possible incident. "They still need a trigger and I would not be surprised if we will see some event in Iraq which implicates the Iranians," said this source.' "They need a pretext."' The general who was interviewed by Seymour Hersh may well be in agreement with that: 'The revised bombing plan "could work-if it's in response to an Iranian attack," the retired four-star general said. "The British may want to do it to get even [for the arrest of the 15 sailors - DJ], but the more reasonable people are saying, 'Let's do it if the Iranians stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.' It's got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks."' 'Bruce Reidel, a former CIA Middle East desk officer, said the neo-conservatives realised their influence would wane rapidly when Mr Bush left office in just over 15 months. "Whatever crazy idea they have to try to transform the Middle East, they have to push now. The real hardline neo-conservatives are getting desperate that the door of history is about to close on them with an epitaph of total failure", writes The Telegraph.

New strategy limits criticism on U.S. while pressure on Iran increases
Now that it appears difficult to make the case against Iran with the argument that the country wants to make nuclear weapons, the Bush Administration is coming up with new alternatives. Perhaps the case of the 15 sailors taken prisoner by Iran was an example of this. 'The Iranian seizure of 15 British naval personnel is an outrage--and an opportunity', writes neocon David Frum for the American Enterprise Institute. This time Frum got passed on his right by the Pentagon. It wanted even more than the tough sanctions that Frum was eyeing. 'Pentagon officials asked their British counterparts: what do you want us to do? They offered a series of military options, a list which remains top secret given the mounting risk of war between the US and Iran. But one of the options was for US combat aircraft to mount aggressive patrols over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran, to underline the seriousness of the situation', writes The Guardian. Afterwards the British sailors admitted that they weren't as innocent as had originally been thought because they had been gathering intelligence in the Gulf. England was under pressure earlier to allow a border incident to escalate. In 2004 General Sanchez ordered the British troops to attack the Iranian Revolutionary Guard: 'An attack would almost certainly have provoked open conflict with Iran. But the British chose instead to resolve the matter through diplomatic channels', writes The Independent.

The fifteen British hostages are free, while the five Iranian diplomats who were taken hostage by the U.S. in April are still in custody. The Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki has promised to release them soon. The charge directed at the Iranians with involvement in the war in Iraq was an overture to the strategy that the Bush Administration is persisting in, namely trying to produce evidence of Iranian interference in the Iraq war: 'In an effort to build congressional and Pentagon support for military options against Iran, the Bush administration has shifted from its earlier strategy of building a case based on an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program to one invoking improvised explosive devices (IEDs) purportedly manufactured in Iran that are killing US soldiers in Iraq [...] despite lacking any direct trail to Tehran', writes The Raw Story. Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix speaking to Seymour Hersh: 'My impression is that the United States has been trying to push up the accusations against Iran as a basis for a possible attack-as an excuse for jumping on them.' President Bush in a press conference: '[...] there will be consequences for people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs that kill Americans in Iraq.' Here Bush is killing two birds with one stone: Iran comes under further pressure, and the blame for failure in Iraq gets shifted.
This tactic runs parallel to an amendement [PDF] that with a slight change passed the Senate with a clear majority. It's not a law - the important thing is that it shows what the mindset in Washington is right now. The amendement 'endorses a set of "findings" that are fundamentally false and which are being used by the administration to lay the groundwork for a more aggressive policy toward Iran', writes the Huffington Post in an article entitled Debunking the Neocons' Iran War Measure. In paragraph three of the amendment it states that 'it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and [stop] the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran [...]'. The following paragraph states that support must be given to 'all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies.' The Huffington Post article demonstrates point-by-point that the amendment manipulates information, and in so doing shows that Bush's tactic is misleading. Speaking of tactics, it recently came to light that President George Bush told the press in the lead-up to the Iraq war that he was looking for a diplomatic solution, while in reality he already knew that he was going to solve the dispute militarily.

'IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran', according to a member of the Bush Administration, as quoted by former CIA agent Robert Baer. 'Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq', says an American intelligence officer this month to The Telegraph. Robert Baer in an interview with Fox's America's Newsroom: 'Interviewer: 'So you're saying today [21 August] that an attack will happen on Iran within six months.' Robert Baer: 'That is the conventional wisdom of people who follow Iran in Washington. [...] I'm writing a book on Iran and they say: 'You'd better hurry up because this attack is coming quickly'.'