Professor Cole has a well reasoned essay at truthdig.com which we all should take a serious look at. In it he declares that the real reason behind the Bush administration’s rhetoric regarding Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program isn’t fear of nukes, it’s regime change:

The Bush administration has arbitrarily taken the position that Iran may not have a nuclear research program at all, even a civilian one. This stance actually contradicts the guarantees of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Washington officials continually intimate to the press that Tehran has an active weapons program, which is speculation. And, of course, the United States itself is egregiously in violation of several articles of the NPT, keeping enough nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert to destroy the world several times over and actively pursuing new and deadly weapons, even dreaming of “tactical” nukes. Its ally in the region, Israel, never signed the NPT and was helped by the British to get a bomb in the 1960s.

The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released in summer 2005 estimates that if Iran did have an active nuclear weapons program, and if the international atmosphere were favorable to it being able to get hold of the requisite equipment, it would still be a good 10 years away from a bomb. But the international atmosphere is actively hostile to such a development, and anyway it has not been proved that there is such a weapons program. […]

The answer is that the Iranian nuclear issue is déjà vu all over again. As it did with regard to the Baath regime in Iraq, the militarily aggressive Bush administration wants to overthrow the government in Tehran. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, now in a coma, urged the U.S. to hit Iran as soon as it had taken care of Saddam Hussein. The Israelis have a grudge against it because it helped end their military occupation and land grab in southern Lebanon by giving aid to the Shiite Hezbollah organization, the only Arab force ever to succeed in regaining occupied land from Israel by military means. But Iran does not form a conventional military threat to Israel.

Overthrowing the theocratic regime in Iran, Washington hopes, would reduce Hezbollah pressure on Israel over its continued occupation of the Shebaa Farms area (and, implicitly, the Golan Heights). It would make Syria more complaisant toward Israel and Washington. It would open up Iran to investment and exploration on the part of the American petroleum majors, which are at the moment excluded because the U.S. slapped an economic boycott on Iran. It might remove support for the more hard-line elements among Shiite political parties in Iraq, making that country easier for the U.S. to shape and dominate. In short, a U.S.-installed regime in Iran would hold out the promise of returning to the halcyon 1960s, when the shah was an American puppet in the region.

The nuclear issue is for the most part a pretext for the Americans to exert pressure on the regime in Tehran. This is not to say that proliferation is not a worrisome issue, or that it can be ruled out that Iran wants a bomb. It is to say that the situation simply has not reached the point of crisis, and therefore other motivations must be sought for the Bush administration’s breathless rhetoric.


More after the break . . .

Please read the entire essay, as there is much more to Professor Cole’s argument. However, the core point he makes is the same one that I and many others have been making for months: there is no real crisis over Iran’s nuclear program outside the one being marketed to the American public by a far from trustworthy Bush administration. Where they have failed in their efforts to remake Iraq, they now hope to succeed in Iran, using the same tired formula that led us down into our current morass.

Russia and China aren’t buying Bush’s fear driven marketing scheme for regime change in Iran, and neither should anyone else:

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia and China have rejected proposals from the United States and other veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council for a statement demanding that Iran clear up suspicions about its nuclear program, diplomats said Monday.

The dispute raises the threat of an impasse in the Security Council and means that the U.S., Britain and France may not get their wish for strong action by the powerful UN body.

This is playing out the same way the Iraq “crisis” played out. After attempting to get what they can from “international diplomacy”, the Bush administration will just throw up its hands (figuratively speaking) in mock dismay, claim the UN is irrelevant and broken, and start gearing up the propaganda machine to hype the next “central front” in the war on terror. Only this time the repercussions could be far, far worse.

Terrorist attacks of far greater frequncy than we have witnessed to date will likely erupt across the Middle East, Europe and quite probably the continental United States in the event of an attack on Iran by the US or Israel. Oil prices will skyrocket, particularly if Iran is able to shut down the strategic strait of Hormuz for any significant period of time. Sunni and Shi’a all across the Middle East could be pulled into a bloody and fratracidal sectarian conflict whose endpoint we might not see within our lifetime. And who really knows what Russia and China might do in the event of an attack that threatens their economic investments in Iran? Yet, this is the path the Bush administration is taking the world down.

Just remember this: Iran’s alleged nuclear threat is only the excuse they’ll use.