Mother Jones Reads the Tealeaves on Iran

First, I’m in substantial agreement with the New York Times. Then I agree with Mother Jones. Will my drift leftward never cease?

A Mother Jones writer asks “an Israeli intel correspondent, an Iranian American activist, an arms expert, a former peace negotiator, and an anti-war intellectual” how likely they think it is that either Israel or the U. S. will attack Iran before the end of the year. Only one of their informants thinks it’s at all likely and that one appears merely to be erring on the side of caution.

Read the snippets in the linked article: they’re mostly short and to the point. There’s lots of saber-rattling but there isn’t any great likelihood that we’ll attack Iran. Unless Iran does something stupid (as I repeated yesterday). That would be pretty inconsistent with their behavior to date.

Meanwhile, now Seymour Hersh can’t even seem to find an unnamed informant who’ll tell him that the Bush Administration plans to invade Iran. In his article in the New Yorker Mr. Hersh outlines what he knows about covert operations against Iran by the U. S. (which isn’t much). The title of his article, “Preparing the Battlefield”, is, presumably, intended to convey the impression that an attack on Iran is imminent without actually saying it.

I’d be disappointed if the U. S. weren’t engaging in covert activities of some kind against the Iranian regime if only support for opposition groups in Iran. Whatever the scale of actual activities in Iran they won’t approach the scope of what the Iranians have been claiming for the last thirty years. To reach that there’d have to be a U. S. operative behind every bush.

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