This Frontline segment appeared Tuesday night, October 23, 2007 between 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET: FRONTLINE: “Showdown With Iran.” It clearly demonstrated the extraordinary incompetence of the Bush administration which, through the war-like rhetoric of Cheney and Bush, is now threatening Iran with a destructive attack on its nuclear facilities. Iranian government representatives, however, were not impressed.
The Israel connection was only briefly and indirectly mentioned, but Neocon representatives of the I LOVE AIPAC gang like Cheney and Bolton clearly spoke about the urgency to neutralize Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Right now, Bush is the most dangerous man on earth because his saber rattling has not impressed the Iranians. “We will defend ourselves (Iranian ambassador, 2005)” is heard again. An Iranian spokesman stated clearly that their medium range ballistic missiles were capable to hitting any target in Israel.
What that appears to mean is that the ball is now in Bush’s court. And we should be worried because the danger extends well beyond higher gas prices.
The press release for the FRONTLINE program is as follows:
FRONTLINE Investigates Mounting Tension for the U.S. in the Middle East and Asks: Is Iran Next?
As the United States and Iran are locked in a battle for power and influence across the Middle East — with the fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon looming in the background — FRONTLINE gains unprecedented access to the Iranian hard-liners shaping government policy. In “Showdown With Iran,” airing Tuesday, October 23, 2007, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET on PBS, FRONTLINE examines how U.S. efforts to install democracy in Iraq have served to strengthen Iran’s position as an emerging power in the Middle East.
“You will not find a single instance in which a country has inflicted harm on us and we have left it without a response. So if the United States makes such a mistake, they should know that we will definitely respond. And we don’t make threats,” deputy head of Iran’s National Security Council Mohammad Jafari tells FRONTLINE in his first television interview.
There are increasing signs that the Bush administration is seriously considering military action before it leaves office if Tehran continues to defy U.N. demands that it cease enriching uranium for its nuclear program — a program the Iranians insist is for peaceful purposes. “The president has said repeatedly that it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton tells FRONTLINE. “If action is not taken in terms of regime change or, if need be, the use of military force, the question of when Iran achieves nuclear weapons is entirely in Iran’s own hands. And that is extraordinarily undesirable.”
Richard Armitage, President Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, warns, “It would be the worst of worlds for an outgoing administration to start a conflict.”
After 9/11, the Bush administration hoped to drive a wedge between Iran’s people and their Islamic rulers by installing democracies on two of Iran’s borders. “If things had gone better in Iraq,” says Hillary Mann, the Iran expert on the National Security Council during the run-up to the war, “then yeah, I think Iran was next.”
“I think Iran is more secure now, courtesy of the United States,” Bolton says. “We have removed the Taliban regime from Afghanistan, which they viewed as a mortal threat. We have removed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which they viewed as a mortal threat.”
Before invading Iraq, the Bush administration rebuffed a series of overtures from Iran’s reformist government — among them offers to help the U.S. stabilize Iraq after the invasion — which culminated in a secret proposal for a grand bargain resolving all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Iran, including Iran’s support for terrorism and its nuclear program. The U.S., which had branded Iran part of the “axis of evil,” decided on a confrontational approach.
Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, believes the Bush administration’s confrontational approach discredited Iran’s reformists and inadvertently helped bring the new hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. “The wars of 2001 and 2003 have fundamentally changed the Middle East to Iran’s advantage,” he says. “The dam that was containing Iran has been broken.”
LINK here.
The key to appreciating this confrontational situation is once again, Bush incompetence.
UPDATE: This just in from the Washington Post:
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 25, 2007; Page A07
In the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, Iran has become the new Iraq.
Iran is now the front line in a foreign policy debate that has found Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) defending a vote that her rivals said could embolden President Bush to once again launch unilateral military action against a Middle Eastern nation.
The discussion is almost identical to one that took place earlier in the campaign over Clinton’s 2002 vote for the resolution authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq, except that, in this case, she finds herself on the opposite side of all her leading rivals for the nomination.
The focus on Iran highlights the extent to which national security remains the key fault line in the Democratic race as Clinton’s opponents seek to slow her momentum. With the administration now preparing to designate a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization and to impose sanctions on Iran, the debate is only likely to intensify.
Go to the Post for the rest of the article.
