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If the US attacks Iran, all bets are off on what's to come. The echoes of Waterloo could turn George Bush's Middle East adventurism into his inadvertent Samson option by expanding the Iraq conflict to a regional one with impossible to predict consequences that won't be good for Western interests and especially US ones. It will inflame the region and produce a tsunami of Shia rage and solidarity enough to inflame and unite the whole Muslim world in fierce opposition to America, its culture and people. It may irrevocably transform the region making it unwelcome for decades or longer to anything Western that only arrives for what it can take and doesn't take no for an answer.
It's backlash may also affect the administration and its party as unintended fallout from an ill-conceived adventure gone sour and beyond repair. And it may have further unintended consequences as well - the painful blowback kind from angry people striking back in catastrophic payback ways far harsher than ever before. It could be a dirty bomb or two detonated in one more US cities or a nuclear reactor core meltdown from sabotage or attack releasing lethal radiation in amounts great enough to make downwind areas from it forever uninhabitable. Imagine a nightmarish vision of New York or Chicago (surrounded by 11 aging nuclear power plants) as ghost towns, their structures intact but unfit to be occupied.
There is a macabre bright side, however, once past the onslaught if it comes and its aftermath. In six years, the Bush administration achieved the near-impossible. It made the US a pariah state alienating the whole Muslim world and vast numbers more everywhere including growing numbers at home with George Bush's approval rating at numbers approaching the lowest ever for a US president. Its policies of permanent war on the world, repression at home, entrenched corruption, worship of wealth and privilege, and indifference to human needs and the people he was elected to serve already destroyed any notion the country is a model democratic state or that Bush and his neocon fanatics should be governing it. Their imperial arrogance accelerated the country's fading global hegemony well advanced since the 1970s and likely irreversible. They buried the nation's influence and dominance in Iraq's smoldering sands and Afghanistan's rubble that are now both graveyards for US ambitions in those regions and beyond.
Attacking Iran will just make things far worse. It would be a fanatical "hail Mary" act of insanity that by one definition is repeating the same mistakes, expecting different results. It has no more chance of success than our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if nuclear weapons are used, including so-called low-yield ones, it will be an appalling crime against humanity and catastrophic event potentially affecting millions in the region by radiation poisoning alone. If it happens, it will irreversibly weaken US influence and credibility everywhere accelerating our decline even faster toward second-class status and loss of world leadership already hanging by a thread. It could also be a potentially lethal blow to the benefits of "Western civilization" always arriving through the barrel of a gun and thuggish heel of a colonizer's boot with the US having the biggest barrels and largest shoe sizes.
Key US players know the risks and want our losses cut before it's too late to act. They want an end to war, not more of it in a strategically vital world region too important to lose while fearing it's likely too late. The National Intelligence Estimate supports them believing the war in Iraq is unwinnable, transforming the country into a pro-American state impossible, and the president's notion of victory illusory. George Bush ignores its assessment and presses on.
Reports by Seymour Hersh and others now say the administration wants to weaken the Bashir Assad-led Syrian government's alliance with Iran and further undermine Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon and the region by funding Sunni extremist groups with known ties to al-Queda in what's called a "redirection program." It's the brainchild of Dick Cheney/Elliott Abrams (of Iran-Contra notoriety)/Zalmay Khalilzad/Condi Rice/Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan/Israeli elements & Co. with CIA's hands are all over it covertly beyond Congress' reach. It includes a larger effort, with Saudi help, to fund and unleash Sunni extremist elements against Tehran at the same time Washington is preparing to include Iran and Syria in regional discussions on the situation in Iraq. It proves again duplicity and shameless hypocrisy are never in short supply in Washington. They're only topped by the neocon leadership's crazed strategy to make a hopeless Middle East debacle catastrophic.
The Concocted Myth of Iran's Threat
The ancient Persian empire became Iran on March 21, 1935. From that time till now, Iran obeyed international law, never occupied a foreign territory, and never threatened or attacked another state beyond occasional border skirmishes over unsettled disputes of the kinds other nations engage in that are far short of all out wars. It only had full-scale conflict defensively after Saddam Hussein launched a full-scale invasion in September, 1980 backed, equipped and financially aided by Washington that included supplying chemical and biological weapon precursors and crucial intelligence on Iranian field positions and force strength.
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