Iran: The Next Act

I'll get back to the Tom Schaller stuff soon enough, but this just has to be posted...

Hersh: CIA Analysis Finds Iran Not Developing Nuclear Weapons
Agence France-Presse
Sunday 19 November 2006

Washington - A classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said.

Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week.

A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy.

"If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said.

The Democratic victory unleashed a surge of calls for the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran.

But the administration's planning of a military option was made "far more complicated" in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," he wrote.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story...

I've made this point repeatedly on these pages but I just don't think I can emphasize it enough, just in case someone is reading this. This nothing short of a replay of the exact same thing they did in the runup to the war in Iraq. Now we're stuck in that ongoing disaster in Iraq. Not only have they learned all the wrong lessons -- if anything at all -- from that experience but they don't seem to care in the least about the consequences of it. Instead, they're going to try to do it to us again! Enough is enough.

"Can't get fooled again", folks.