Is Bush planning war against Iran?

It is now clear that the US President George W. Bush has decided to confront Iran - politically, economically and militarily - rather than engage it in negotiations, as he was advised to do by James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their Iraq Study Group report.

Bush appears to have been influenced by pro-Israeli advisers such as Eliott Abrams, the man in charge of the Middle East at the National Security Council, and by arm-chair strategists at neoconservative think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, who have long clamoured for "regime change" in Tehran....

On a recent visit to the Middle East, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought to mobilise the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, plus Egypt and Jordan, to join the US in confronting Iran.

Leading Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are, of course, concerned by the rise of Iran and of militant Shiism, but they are even more alarmed at the possibility of a US/Israeli war against Iran, which would inevitably inflict heavy blows on their own societies...

These many moves have aroused fears in European capitals - and in the Arab world -that Bush has embarked on the road to war...

The situation is not unlike that of 2003, when France opposed the invasion of Iraq, triggering a severe diplomatic crisis between Paris and Washington.

Chirac is planning to send a high-level envoy to Tehran to urge the Iranian authorities to rein in Hezbollah, and thereby help defuse the dangerous situation in Lebanon, a country to which the French president is particularly attached...

# posted by mohamad @ 3:35 PM