Iranian Friction

Glenn Greenwald has an eye-popping blog entry on Unclaimed Territory. It has to do with the American mainstream media's attention deficit regarding Bush's Iranian intentions.

Greenwald claims that the rhetoric Bush used in his speech last night amounts to more than threats against Iran, should they interfere with American goals in Iraq. He says they amount to a declaration of war with Iran.

In some of his sharpest words of warning to Iran, Mr. Bush accused the Iranian government of “providing material support for attacks on American troops” and vowed to “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies.”

He left deliberately vague the question of whether those operations would be limited to Iraq or conducted elsewhere, and said he had ordered the deployment of a new aircraft carrier strike group to the region, where it is in easy reach of Iranian territory.

While Mr. Bush has previously vowed to work diplomatically, largely inside the United Nations to stop Iran’s nuclear program, in this speech he said nothing about diplomacy.

This is alarming when viewed alongside the more than half a dozen incidents of threats of escalating regional conflict between the US and Iran over the last several months, including the dispatch of naval forces to the region, the arrest of high ranking Iranian military officers, the declaration by Israel of nuclear weapons capability and willingness to use it, and a new report from the BBC today about a US Army raid on the Iranian consulate in Irbil. That is an act of war.

In terms of the January 10th speech from the White House library, the decider signaled that the American and Iraqi security forces he's unleashing on Baghdad will be unrestrained.

In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents, but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we'll have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter those neighborhoods -- and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.

Greenwald is right in his assertion, too, that this lays the groundwork for a near-inevitable conflict with the Iranians.

a war with Iran can happen in many ways other than by some grand announcement by the President that he wants to start a war, followed by a debate in Congress as to whether such a war should be authorized. That is the least likely way for such a confrontation to occur.

We have 140,000 troops (soon to be 20,000 more) sitting in a country that borders Iran and where Iran is operating, with an announced military build-up in the Persian Gulf imminent, increased war rhetoric from all sides, the beginning of actual skirmishes already, a reduction (if not elimination) on the existing constraints with which our military operates in Iraq, and a declaration by the President that Iran is our enemy in the current war.

That makes unplanned -- or seemingly unplanned -- confrontations highly likely, whether through miscalculation, miscommunication, misperception, or affirmative deceit.

So Bush is determined to carry out the AEI, PNAC, Weekly Standard, Fox News neocon-Office of Special Plans agenda. He wants us to go for all the marbles in the midEast, while we have the initiative. We're going to escalate into Iran, widen the war so we can bring our full arsenal to bear, and try to secure our access to oil and our military hegemony through one early showdown.

It's a pipe dream, though. No matter what we do to them, we'll never be able to consolidate our "victory." It's not our territory.