An article in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh charges that the military has increased "clandestine activities" within Iran, including meeting with leaders from rebel groups and performing reconnaissance missions.
The article says the Bush administration has considered using nukes against Iran, which would violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Meanwhile, Bush has dismissed charges that he plans to invade Iran as "wild speculation" and has reiterated that he prefers diplomacy.
Does this seem familiar?
An April 17, 2004, a Washington Post article said President George W. Bush began planning to attack Iraq only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks while publicly asserting that he preferred diplomacy.
Given that historical precedent - along with the covert ops and insistence by the United States and the European Union that Iran seeks to develop nuclear weapons - these charges that Bush actually plans to go to war with Iran don't sound like "wild speculation" to me.
Other themes from the period leading up to the Iraq war repeat themselves, as well. Hersh writes that members of the Bush administration believe an attack on Iran would humiliate its government - encouraging the people to rise up and overthrow it.
But Iran isn't Iraq.
We would face military forces much more powerful and well-armed than those we met in Iraq, especially considering that our military is already overstretched. Iran could then retaliate by attacking our forces in Iraq or attacking Israel.
Iran's government also enjoys much broader support among Iranians than Saddam Hussein did among Iraqis, as Iranian voters' preference of Islamic fundamentalist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over reformist Hashemi Rafsanjani shows. But even Iraqis now bomb our soldiers instead of praising them for being liberators, as Bush promised they would.
So, will the Iranian people rise up against their leaders and greet our soldiers with flowers and candy before or after I win American Idol?
The worst part is that Bush would predicate this all on the faulty notion that Iran seeks to develop nuclear weapons, even though Iran contends that it only intends to use uranium enrichment for energy. Experts such as former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix say that even if Iran did have a program to develop nuclear weapons, it would take the country at least five years to produce one bomb.
But I've heard this story before. Bush used the same argument to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq as the clause "there is mounting evidence" became so common in the media that it seemed due to become a catch phrase.
Of course, Hussein didn't have those weapons of mass destruction, and neither does Iran.
I'm also sick of hearing about how we're in Iraq to build democracy when we clearly don't care about democracy - we care about cheap oil.
We didn't topple Hussein's brutal regime in the 1980s when he was our ally, did we? We did, however, help topple the democratically elected government of socialist Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and replace it with the dictatorship of the shah after Mossadegh tried to nationalize Iran's oil production. We also support the Saudi Arabian royal family, which presides over a regime just as brutal as Hussein's and far worse than Iran's theocracy.
All of these brutal regimes have something in common: At one time or another, they have fed our economy's dependence on oil and kept prices down while giving preferential treatment to Western and, especially, American corporations. We didn't mind Augusto Pinochet or Chiang Kai-shek, nor do we mind the House of Saud - as long as they serve our interests.
Bush lied to send us to war before, and how he's at it again.
But I didn't buy it in 2003, and I'm not buying it now.
Write to Alaric at ajdearment@bsu.edu
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