Ready to roll on Iran?

Unfortunately, it's starting to look more and more like it.

We've got Karl Rove's departure which, as Sidney Blumenthal has observed, removes one more restraint on Dick Cheney's influence over Bush. (If "restraint" is even the word; "impediment" may be more like it.)

Will Bunch thinks we're looking at what Cheney and Bush are conceiving as A prelude to war: What's really behind Bush's Iran move Attytood blog 08/15/07. His read on Rove's resignation and the leak this week saying that the administration intends to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (a government military institution) as a terrorist group is, "The White House hawks in Dick Cheney's office and elsewhere who want to stage an attack on Iran are clearly winning the internal power struggle."

This crew has been making warlike noises toward Iran off and on since the 2004 elections. But it's looking more and more like the end-game has begun, which will either result in Cheney putting through his plan to expand the Iraq War into Iran, or with Congress and the public blocking it.

Gareth Porter, who has kept a close eye on the diplomatic manueverings inside and outside the administraiton, takes the recent news, especially a McClatchey report of last week, as a very bad sign.

He writes in Cheney, Lieberman and Iran War Conspiracy Huffington Post 08/16/07:

I was never one of those who believed the Bush administration was getting ready to attack Iran in 2006 or early 2007. But it is now clear that at least Vice President Dick Cheney is conspiring to push through a specific plan for war with Iran. And Senator Joe Lieberman is an active part of that conspiracy.

His reconstruction of matters suggests that Cheney's current plan is to stage limited strikes on alleged "training camps" in Iran that are said to be aiding anti-American insurgents in Iran. He hopes this would provoke Iran into an overt counter-attack which he could then use to justify and rally support for a more broad-based "strategic" strike on Iran. Porter also observes:

In February 2007, Hillary Mann, the National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs until 2004, told CNN that the Bush administration was "pushing a series of increasing provocations against the Iranians in, I think, anticipation that Iran will eventually retaliate, and that will give the United States the ability to launch limited strikes against Iran, to take out targets in Iran that we consider to be important."

The revelation of the Cheney attack proposal throws a new light on a series of developments relating to Iraq since early June. The first event that takes on new meaning is Joe Lieberman's public call on June 11 for exactly the same kind of attack on the alleged training bases in Iran as Cheney was advocating inside the administration.

Porter cites a sources of his own on Lieberman's move:

"Lieberman is not the kind of guy who goes off on his own to make a proposal like this," says the observer. "He's very disciplined. He's a foot soldier, an integral part of the neoconservative movement.

In other words, Lieberman was acting as a stalking horse for Cheney's proposal, softening up public opinion for later war propaganda.

Tags: gareth porter, iran, iran war