An article in last weekend’s edition of the Sunday Telegraph in Britain confirms that the US is drawing up plans for air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Long-distance B2 bombers, each carrying up to 20 tonnes of precision bombs and flying from bases in the US, would “most likely” be involved.

“Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learned. They are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic’s nuclear bomb ambitions,” the article stated.

Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?

Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. “He lacked [John] Kennedy’s ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking,” she wrote. “Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions.”

Nuclear Hypocrisy and Global Ambitions
The pace of diplomatic maneuvers, political charges, and military threats by the U.S. against Iran is quickening. This crisis has been building since George W. Bush, in his State of the Union speech four years ago, made Iran a target in the so-called “war on terror” by declaring it part of an “axis of evil” (along with Iraq and North Korea) and accusing the Iranian government of pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. Tensions escalated dramatically several weeks ago when Iran reopened its Natanz nuclear facility, which can produce enriched uranium.

Every day new stories in the media add to an increasingly horrifying trend preparing world opinion for a military onslaught against Iran. The propaganda war against Iran ”based on blatant untruths, half-truths, double standards and distortions” acts as a basis to confuse the public and intimidate potential voices of opposition against a new war in the Middle East. In the absence of strong opposition to their threats against Iran, the governments of the US and Israel speak openly of military strikes, and the Pentagon is even reported to be considering the pre-emptive use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran.