The U.K. Daily Telegraph has emerged, in the Bush years, as one of the least reliable papers in the Western world. They routinely publish unsourced or poorly sourced rumors or even rank propaganda. Today, they seem to be breaking some kind of big story, but it is much more likely that this is more of a psychological campaign that is aimed at the Iranian leadership.

Israel is negotiating with the United States for permission to fly over Iraq as part of a plan to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

To conduct surgical air strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme, Israeli war planes would need to fly across Iraq. But to do so the Israeli military authorities in Tel Aviv need permission from the Pentagon.

A senior Israeli defence official said negotiations were now underway between the two countries for the US-led coalition in Iraq to provide an “air corridor” in the event of the Israeli government deciding on unilateral military action to prevent Teheran developing nuclear weapons.

“We are planning for every eventuality, and sorting out issues such as these are crucially important,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

“The only way to do this is to fly through US-controlled air space. If we don’t sort these issues out now we could have a situation where American and Israeli war planes start shooting at each other.”

In my opinion, this is not the type of information that would be leaked if it were really true. Rather, leaks of this sort are what stand in for the ordinary diplomacy that the neo-conservatives eschew. Rather than sit down with the Iranians and negotiate, and rather than threaten them directly, the neo-conservatives seed the press with dire threats of airstrikes, invasion, infiltration, etc.

This is not to say that the administration is not carrying out infiltration and sabotage, nor to deny that war plans have been drawn up for a variety of missions and contingencies. What I am suggesting is that the reason this particular article has appeared, and appeared now, is to frighten the Iranians. In its own twisted way, this is an example of the Bush administration engaging the Iranians in negotiation.

This form of negotiation has been going on for a while. After Seymour Hersh wrote THE IRAN PLANS: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb? in April 2006, Fred Kaplan discussed whether all his revelations were for real. He concluded they were not, but were a rehash of Nixon’s Madman Theory.

The Madman Theory. In his first few years as president, Richard Nixon tried to force North Vietnam’s leaders to the peace table by persuading them that he was a madman who would do anything to win the war. His first step, in October 1969, was to ratchet up the alert levels of U.S. strategic nuclear forces as a way of jarring the Soviet Union into pressuring the North Vietnamese to back down. A few years later, he stepped up the bombing of the North and put out the word that he might use nukes. In neither case did this ploy have any effect whatsoever. Nor is there much reason to believe it would make the Iranians shake in their boots. A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran today returned the volley by dismissing the report as part of a “psychological war” campaign. The danger of this rhetorical escalation (if that’s all it is) is that it can spin out of control. If Washington and Tehran are playing a game of global chicken (as I speculated last week), upping the stakes with nukes is like loading the front bumper with a barrel of dynamite and a crying baby.

That is what we are seeing again today with this article in the UK Telegraph. The Iranians need to see an attack as credible in order for them to be incentivized to make concessions. Since an attack isn’t credible, at least not without causing Congress to go ballistic, the neo-cons are relying on articles like this to try to raise doubt in the Iranians’ minds.

Someone should really document all of these psy-ops that have been run throught the Telegraph, starting in 2002, and use it to teach a high school course on ‘how to read the papers’.