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The war drums are beating hard in this the last summer of the Bush presidency. Israel practices bombing runs far out in the Mediterranean, refueling more than 100 fighter bombers in midair, in what is advertised as practice against Iranian nuclear facilities.
President George W. Bush goes to Europe to garner support and issue threats in the cause of confrontation. Israeli politicians line up to replace the politically ailing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as he struggles to swim against a current of corruption charges, jockeying for who can make the most belligerent threats against Iran.
Is the Bush White House talking itself into attacking Iran as its moral duty to save the world from Iran? Condoleezza Rice's State Department is hoping for a diplomatic solution, and Robert Gates, at Defense, is not the attack dog that his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, was. For the moment they seem to have Bush's ear.
But although our supernationalist vice president, Dick Cheney, may not wield the influence he did in Bush's first term, he retains his unshakable belief in the use of force. And Bush retains his messianic streak.
Or has the attack torch been passed to Israel? A year ago Olmert was urging Bush to attack Iran before he left office. But that became politically less marketable once U.S. intelligence declared that Iran had given up its bomb making. It is said that Bush gave the green light for Israel to do whatever it thought necessary when he visited Israel recently.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran bears much responsibility for this state of affairs with his outrageous statements saying that Israel should be wiped from the face of the map. Ahmadinejad is losing popularity as he mismanages Iran's economy, and the approaching elections could do him damage. Nothing would guarantee a return of his popularity more than an American or Israeli bombing run.
Nor is it believed that a strike on Iran would do anything more than set bomb making back a year or two. Iran's nuclear laboratories are buried deep, and no one knows exactly where they are.
An attack would guarantee an eventual Iranian bomb. Also, the capacity of Iran to hurt U.S. interests in the Middle East is considerable, threatening the free flow of petroleum. We would also reinforce the widespread belief that we are the forever enemies of all Islam, Shiite and Sunni.
The United States struggles to blame every wrong in Iraq on the mysterious, hidden hand of Iran. When a bomb killed 63 people in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, the U.S. blamed it on a renegade Shiite, claiming that the motive for killing his own people was to stir up trouble with the Sunnis.
Perhaps it is true, but then again perhaps it is not, and, as usual in these cases, the U.S. offered little in the way of proof. Indeed, time after time when the U.S. accuses Iran of this or that mischief in Iraq there is seldom proof.
Iran certainly has its own interests in Iraq, and feels threatened by American troops on two frontiers. My guess is that Iran will go back to making a nuclear weapon. The threats against the Iranian state would almost demand it from Iran's point of view.
However, the Iranians are an ancient and sophisticated people. They know that Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. There is a strong deterrence against Iran ever using a nuclear weapon aggressively.
But they would give it to terrorists, goes the argument. And here we come to the biggest irony of all. Last week we learned that Pakistan's rogue nuclear exporters, originally under the direction of the father of Pakistan's bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, have spread digitized blueprints for a small, compact, easy-to-hide atomic bomb to computers around the world.
It was Pakistan's democratically elected leaders who got Pakistan into the nuclear export business, trading bomb technology for long range missiles with North Korea. Libya and Iran, too, were beneficiaries of Pakistan's nuclear largesse.
Scientists agree that Iran is some years away from a bomb. Meanwhile, blueprints for the very type of bomb terrorists would most want spew forth from our ally Pakistan while we obsess about Iran.
What's wrong with this picture?
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