Beware the bombing of Iran.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment

Just because a course of action is foolish, irrational, costly, and bloody doesn't mean the Bush Administration won't pursue it. And just because U.S. troops are bogged down in Iraq doesn't mean the Bush Administration has lost its appetite for military adventurism.

This is an Administration that discounts the downside and hypes the upside to military action. It now appears to be gearing up to bomb Iran. We ought not be lulled into a false sense of complacency. Bush's low poll numbers and his Iraq fiasco may be reasons as much for him to launch bombs as not.

Progressive experts who have been following U.S. security issues for decades are increasingly certain that Bush is going forward with his Iran bombing plans.

There is a 75 percent likelihood that Bush will bomb Iran before the 2006 elections, Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, tells The Progressive.

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker has been warning for more than a year now that Bush will attack Iran. "The guys on the inside really want to do this," he said on CNN as far back as January 17, 2005.

"In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran," Hersh wrote in The New Forker at that time. "The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran" since the summer of 2004. "The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids."

Joseph Cirincione, director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, used to think a bombing was unlikely. Not anymore. His sources tell him that senior Bush officials "want to hit Iran hard," he wrote on the website of Foreign Policy magazine on March 27. "What I previously dismissed as posturing I now believe may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran," he said in his posting entitled "Fool Me Twice."

We may look back upon the month of March as the time when the Bush war chefs decided to overheat the rhetoric and bring the conflict with Iran to a boil.

Once again, Cheney stirred the pot.

As he did with his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August of 2002, which put the Iraq War in the oven, Cheney gave a speech on March 7 that moved confrontation with Iran to the front burner.

Cheney warned of "meaningful consequences" if Iran "stays on its present course." He stressed that "the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime." And he said: "We join other nations in sending that regime a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

He was not alone in turning up the...