For quite some time, I’ve believed the Iraq War was set up as a launch pad for the real conquest the neocons are after: Iran. Today, Juan Cole wrote:

I was talking to two otherwise well-informed Israeli historians a couple of weeks ago, and they expressed the conviction that Ahmadinejad had threatened to nuke Israel. I was taken aback. First of all, Iran doesn’t have a nuke. Second, there is no proof that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program. Third, Ahmadinejad has denied wanting a bomb. Fourth, Ahmadinejad has never threatened any sort of direct Iranian military action against Israel. In other words, that is a pretty dramatic fear for educated persons to feel, on the basis of . . . nothing.

I renew my call to readers to write protest letters to newspapers and other media every time they hear it alleged that Ahmadinejad (or “Iran”!) has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” There is no such idiom in Persian and it is not what he said, and the mistranslation gives entirely the wrong impression. Wars can start over bad translations.

It was apparently some Western wire service that mistranslated the phrase as ‘wipe Israel off the map’, which sounds rather more violent than calling for regime change. Since then, Iranian media working in English have themselves depended on that translation. One of the tricks of Right-Zionist propagandists is to substitute these English texts for Ahmadinejad’s own Persian text. (Ethan Bronner at the New York Times tried to pull this, and more recently Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute.) But good scholarship requires that you go to the original Persian text in search of the meaning of a phrase. Bronner and Rubin are guilty of disregarding philological scholarship in favor of mere propagandizing.

These propaganda efforts against Iran and Ahmadinejad also depend on declining to enter into evidence anything else he has ever said– like that it would be wrong to kill Jews! They also ignore that Ahmadinejad is not even the commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces.

Anyone who reads this column knows that I deeply disagree with Ahmadinejad’s policies and am not interested in defending him on most things. I profoundly disagree with his characterization of Israel, which is a legitimate United Nations member state, and find his Holocaust denial monstrous. But this quite false charge that he is genocidal is being promoted by Right-Zionists in and out of Congress as a preparatory step to getting up a US war against Iran on false pretences. I don’t want to see my country destroyed by being further embroiled in the Middle East for the wrong reasons. If the Israeli hardliners and their American amen corner want a war with Iran, let them fight it themselves and leave young 18 year old Americans alone.

I echo Professor Cole’s call to actively engage your local press on the topic of Iran. The Bush administration has been backing itself increasingly into a corner, where it’s refusing oversight and the available evidence suggests they’re destroying evidence in violation of several laws, rather than disclose more monstrous law violations more likely to outrage the public.

They cannot continue to hold that position. Calls for greater scrutiny will continue to increase. The pressure to withdraw troops from Iraq will only grow. Backed into a corner, most animals become more dangerous and an administration with the record this one has not only has already demonstrated its threat to the country, but has to ward off investigations that could lead to their prosecution for war crimes.

It is likely to demonstrate further viciousness, as most cornered animals do.

Which leads back to Iran. Trumping up a fresh war, with rising reports of Iran’s involvement in the War on Iraq, remains their most obvious out. Getting the country fired up against Iran is not so hard to do, as many Americans have lingering resentments dating back to the 1970s hostage crisis. Making Iran the big new scapegoat can restore that part of Bush’s base that has been eroding, distract the country and dissuade scrutiny of the executive branch during yet another wartime initiative.

Elected GOP members of the House and Senate will welcome that, as it offers a way to blunt the current attention being paid to Cheney and Bush’s debacles, foreign and domestic, which threatens their party’s election chances. But it can only occur if there appears to be solid evidence that Iran has acted aggressively against US troops (as oppsed to actual evidence.)

Already the rumors occurring intermittently about Iran are designed to condition us into believing Iran has committed acts of war. It’s been so effective that, as Cole notes, scholars have been bamboozled into viewing Iran as ready to commit genocide against Israel. How easy is it to convince less studious eyes when polls show 40+% of Americans think Iraq was involved in the 9-11 attacks?

To my peers in the blogging world, I advise eternal vigilance and a persistent counter-effort in the media, to prevent the propagandizing going on about Iran. Be cognizant that, as the noose tightens around this lawless band of war criminals within the Bush administration, it’s not a time to relish their discomfort but to be ready for bold acts of desperation and head them off.

One only needs to consider who the longterm Middle East allies have been in our nation’s effort to control oil supplies. Sunni Saudis, Sunni Egyptians, Sunni Kuwaitis, Sunni Kurds, even Sunni Saddam and Osama, before they turned rogue.

The neocons long ago decided that the Shias were the fly in the ointment. They left Saddam in power in the first Gulf War because they didn’t want the Shia majority taking over and when the Shia uprising came in that postwar period, the Bushies offerred no support and Saddam slaughtered them.

And all the recent reports indicate our generals are negotiating with Sunni insurgent leaders now, while maintaining a distance from Iraq’s most popular leader, Moqtada al-Sadr. The only Shias Bush has engaged are elitist puppets like al-Maliki, a weak unpopular leader that Iraq’s majority Shias shun.

The war against Shia Iran is coming. The only way to stop it is to ramp up efforts to debunk all the rumored transgressions of Iran’s leaders CONSTANTLY. Between August this year and September 2008 is the most likely window for this administration’s offensive against Iran. Strategically, they can pull this off despite our overstretched military because it will be an air war: Iran’s ground forces are too numerous for us to engage directly.

Say hello to a worse misstep against the largest nation we’ve faced since Vietnam. Say hello to $4/gallon gasoline -at least - with Bush’s cronies reaping even more record profits from that.

Their danger increases (and their greed as well) as the Democratic Congress bores in to pursue the truth.

Can we prevent it? I don’t know. But we should do our damnedest to try.