And neither was Harry Reid when he made this statement:

“The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid told the National Press Club.

There are plans to attack Iran, and they aren’t merely “contingency plans” that the US Military prepares for all potential adversaries, as many claim. How do I know this? Why is Harry Reid warning the President? Read on …

US contingency planning for military action against Iran’s nuclear programme goes beyond limited strikes and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former US intelligence analyst said on Friday.

“I’ve seen some of the planning … You’re not talking about a surgical strike,” said Wayne White, who was a top Middle East analyst for the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research until March 2005.

“You’re talking about a war against Iran” that likely would destabilise the Middle East for years, White told the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank.

“We’re not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We’re talking about clearing a path to the targets” by taking out much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that could target commerce or US warships in the Gulf, and maybe even Iran’s ballistic missile capability, White said.

When people who served in Bush’s administration speak out we ought to take them seriously. Time after time, however, the media has either ignored these voices (General Shinseki, General Zinni) or attempted to marginalize and smear them (Richard Clarke, David Kuo, Paul O’Neill). Well, it’s long past time for that sort of behavior. Mr. White’s claims about Bush’s war plan for Iran should be front page news on every major American newspaper, but they were not.

As I’ve noted before, the media never likes to get off a particular narrative once that storyline has been inserted by the Bush administration into its echo chamber of pundits and assorted “experts” (from conservative think tanks mostly). The memes about Iran that our muddled media has been promoting are these:

(1) Iran is scary because it wants the BOMB.

(2) Iran’s President is a Hitler wannabe who wants to destroy Israel in a nuclear holocaust.

(3) Diplomacy won’t work.

(4) Sooner or later we will have to act militarily before Iran gets too powerful to contain.

The problem with most of them is that they are misleading at best or dead wrong at worst. Iran is not a powerful country. Outside of oil, it lacks any substantial economy. It’s nuclear program is in its infancy, and is nowhere near completing the steps necessary to manufacture a nuclear device, much less a warhead that could be fitted atop Iran’s rudimentary ballistic missiles, as the CIA has noted. In short, it’s “nuclear threat” is not imminent.

Secondly, it is not a potential dominant power in the region. It has many weaknesses:

Middle East expert Kenneth Katzman argued “Iran’s ascendancy is not only manageable but reversible” if one understands the Islamic republic’s many vulnerabilities.

Tehran’s leaders have convinced many experts Iran is a great nation verging on “superpower” status, but the country is “very weak … (and) meets almost no known criteria to be considered a great nation,” said Katzman of the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service.

The economy is mismanaged and “quite primitive,” exporting almost nothing except oil, he said.

Also, Iran’s oil production capacity is fast declining and in terms of conventional military power, “Iran is a virtual non-entity,” Katzman added.

This was no doubt why Iran tried to cut a deal with the Bush administration in 2003 that would have achieved most of our goals vis-à-vis Iran. An overture, by the way, that was rejected out of hand by Vice President Cheney and his cabal of neocon supporters in the Pentagon and at the White House:

An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp. […]

“We thought it was a very propitious moment” to strike a deal, Wilkerson said. “But as soon as it got to the vice president’s office, the old mantra of ‘We don’t talk to evil’ . . . reasserted itself.” […]

Wilkerson said that, in return for its cooperation, Tehran asked Washington to lift sanctions and to dismantle the Mujahedeen Khalq, an Iranian opposition group that has bases in Iraq.

Iran also offered to increase the transparency of its nuclear program, according to Wilkerson.

In effect, our refusal enabled the extremist factions within Iran to gain ascendancy and elect it’s leader, Ahmadinejad as President. Ahmadinejad’s political position (i.e., the need to play to his base of extremist and Islamic fundamentalist supporters) and his aggressive and often venomous rhetoric played into the Bush administration’s hands, allowing them to paint him as a madman willing to unleash a holy war against Israel and the United States. This despite the fact that they well knew the president was not the ultimate authority in Iran (that honor resides in the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), and that more moderate elements still controlled many of the levers of power.

Oddly enough, even as a “senior official” in the Bush administration continue to trumpet the danger posed by Ahmadinejad’s regime, his authority, influence and power are in decline, as the moderates in Iran have fought back and reclaimed much of the power they lost:

IRAN’S supreme leader is considering a change of policy on the country’s nuclear programme in an effort to defuse growing tension with the West, according to senior sources in Tehran.

Alarmed by mounting US pressure and United Nations sanctions, officials close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei favour the appointment of a more moderate team for international negotiations on the supervision of its nuclear facilities.

The move would be a snub to the bellicose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose threats to destroy Israel have left Iran increasingly isolated and facing a serious economic downturn.

Tehran sources said the impetus for a policy switch was coming from Khamenei, who has ultimate power over Iran’s foreign policy, security and armed forces.

In short, once again, there is a deal to be made with Iran if we are willing to engage them diplomatically: on Iraq, on their nuclear program, on their support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and even perhaps on measures to bring about a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

Yet, our Democratic Congressional leaders, and even some Republicans, feel that they must make a point of warning this administration not to attack Iran. Do you honestly believe they would take these extraordinary steps if they weren’t convinced that attacking Iran is precisely what President Bush and Vice President Cheney most want to do before their ability to initiate another war ends on Inauguration Day, 2009? Do you think mild mannered, Senator Jay “Milquetoast” Rockefeller would have issued these remarks if he didn’t know how far down the path to war Bush has already trod?

The new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday sharply criticized the Bush administration’s increasingly combative stance toward Iran, saying that White House efforts to portray it as a growing threat are uncomfortably reminiscent of rhetoric about Iraq before the American invasion of 2003.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who became chairman of the committee this month, said that the administration was building a case against Tehran even as U.S. intelligence agencies still know little about either Iran’s internal dynamics or its intentions in the Middle East.

“To be quite honest, I’m a little concerned that it’s Iraq again,” Rockefeller said during an interview in his office. “This whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre.”

Bizarre it may be, but not unforeseen. Prominent journalists such as Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry and many progressive voices in the left side of the blogosphere have been warning about the Administration’s desire to have a “do-over” in Iran for quite some time. The ultimate double down, so to speak.

But is the escalation just about Iraq? According to Robert Parry, author of Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, and former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter, “one source familiar with high-level thinking in Washington and Tel Aviv said an unstated reason for the Bush troop ‘surge’ is to bolster the defenses of Baghdad’s Green Zone if a possible Israeli attack on Iran prompts an uprising among Iraqi Shiites.”

The neoconservatives may well have engineered the ouster of John Negroponte, National Security Director, because he said that Iran could not produce a nuclear weapon until sometime in the next decade. The statement outraged neoconservatives and directly contradicted alarmist Israeli intelligence assessments that Tehran could have a warhead in less than two years.

If the United States does intend to hit Iran, or to support such an attack by Israel, then it just appointed the right man for the job. The new head of Central Command (CENTCOM) that oversees the Middle East, Admiral William Fallon, is the former head of U.S. Pacific Command and an expert on air war. Fallon commanded an A-6 tactical bomber wing in Vietnam, a carrier wing, and an aircraft carrier. As retired U.S. navy commander Jeff Huber writes in Pen and Sword, “If anybody knows how to run a maritime

and air operation against Iran, it’s ‘Fox’ Fallon.”

Fallon is also close with the neoconservatives and attended the 2001 awards ceremony of the Jewish Institute for National Security (JINSA), a think tank that strongly pushed for the war in Iraq and currently lobbies for attacking Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney and ex-UN Ambassador John Bolton are both former members of JINSA. The organization sponsored a 2003 conference entitled: “Time to Focus on Iran — The Mother of Modern Terrorism.”

The White House has also secretly formed a policy unit called the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG) to influence U.S. media, funnel covert aid to Iranian dissidents, and collect information and intelligence. One former U.S. official told the Boston Globe that group’s goal in Iran was “regime change.” ISOG is headed up by two neoconservative hawks, James F. Jeffrey and Elliott Abrams.

Abrams formally worked for rightwing Israeli ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and helped write the policy paper, “A Clean Break,” which advocated attacking Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah and unilaterally imposing a “settlement” on the Palestinians. According the Inter-Press Service, during last summer’s war in Lebanon, Abrams carried a message from the Bush Administration encouraging the Olmert government to attack Syria.

So, we are not crazy, those of us who believe that Bush and Cheney are finalizing their plans to wage war against Iran. We have a lot of company who can read the signs and portents as well as we can. Let us hope that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress who clearly see the plans for this insane war being put into operation have the ability to derail it. Somehow, some way. Otherwise we are all of us, screwed big time.