Whether or not Bush manages to plunge the world into a new dark age may depend upon which version of the recent US/Iran confrontation is believed. So far, Bush's utter lack of credibility may be working to our advantage. One dares not think of the consequences to world peace if Bush had embarked upon this tour of the middle east with a shred of credibility, a modicum of political capital among every Middle Eastern capital but Jerusalem.
Alec Russell: So is America going to bomb Iran?A US intelligence report --released in December --pulled the rug from under Bush's primary pretext for war on Iran. If Bush wishes to begin a nuclear war, he will have to manufacture the pretext as Hitler faked a polish attack on German radio towers, as the US hoaxed a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. Surely, there are some members of Bush's otherwise challenged administration who have bothered to read Goebbels and Goring. Nazi literature seems to have become Bush's Junior Woodchuck's Handbook. An update:
Jack Straw: Iran attack would be 'nuts'
The Bush administration is planning to use nuclear weapons against Iran, to prevent it acquiring its own atomic warheads, claims an investigative writer with high-level Pentagon and intelligence contacts.
President George W Bush is said to be so alarmed by the threat of Iran's hard-line leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, that privately he refers to him as "the new Hitler", says Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.Some US military chiefs have unsuccessfully urged the White House to drop the nuclear option from its war plans, Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine. The conviction that Mr Ahmedinejad would attack Israel or US forces in the Middle East, if Iran obtains atomic weapons, is what drives American planning for the destruction of Teheran's nuclear programme.
Hersh claims that one of the plans, presented to the White House by the Pentagon, entails the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One alleged target is Iran's main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, 200 miles south of Teheran.--Philip Sherwell in Washington, Bush 'is planning nuclear strikes on Iran's secret sites'
Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel