By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS - Counterpunch

It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel...The targeted victims are not Poland and France, but Iran, Syria, the remains of the Palestinian West Bank and southern Lebanon...The neoconservatives are ecstatic. Hegemony uber alles is back on track.

Led by Dick Cheney, Bush administration neocons want war on Iran. So does the Israeli Lobby, but it doesn't mean they'll get it.

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS

GENEVA (AP) — An Iranian envoy said Monday his government will not submit to extensive nuclear inspections while Israel stays outside the global treaty to curb the spread of atomic weapons.

By ANDREW COCKBURN - May 2, 2008

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that...[is] "unprecedented in its scope."...Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials.

MARK MACKINNON | March 3, 2008 | The Globe and Mail

BAGHDAD -- It's a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can drive in broad daylight though this war-ravaged city and spend the night at the presidential palace, but George W. Bush can't.

By M K Bhadrakumar | Asia Times

There was a time when Iran might have believed that a multipolar world order would be just and fair from the point of view of the "suppressed nations". If that notion wasn't shattered long ago, it was surely was last Friday when the director of Rosatom, Russia's federal agency for nuclear power, Sergei Kiriyenko, urgently flew to Washington on a one-day "working visit".

by Doug Ireland - December 10, 2007

The Islamic Republic of Iran murdered Makwan Moloudzadeh, a lad of 21, on the cold morning of December 5. Makwan was dragged at dawn from his jail cell in the Kermanshah Central Prison and hanged in secret within the prison, without the required presence of his lawyer and family, for the so-called "crime" of having had anal sexual relations, which the authorities claimed was rape, with boys of his own age eight years ago, when he was 13.

Counter Punch (Paul Roberts and Alexander Cockburn)

The latest, fatal instrument of Bush’s public humiliation is the National Intelligence Estimate proclaiming in its unclassified version that Iran stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2003, thus deliberately, with humiliating clarity contradicting Bush and Cheney’s unending invocation of the Iranian nuclear threat. - Cockburn

[If you get bored of the facts, skip down to Charlie Brooker's hilarious look inside Bush's "tunnel visionary" denial of reality]

President George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not agree on much, but tragically they may find common ground about the disposability of Hassan Parhizkar's life...Since [Nov. 7]...40-year-old gay Iranian businessman [Parhizkar] has been sitting in jail in the Frederick County, Maryland Detention Center...in the living hell of limbo between the freedom he has known since he came to the United States as a young man...and the certain persecution, imprisonment, or worse that will be his fate as a gay man if he is sent back to Iran.

The rhetoric about Iran has escalated to the point where both political parties and practically the whole U.S. press accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that "all options are on the table"...possibly even nuclear weapons. "All options on the table" means that Washington threatens war.

16/ 10/ 2007

TEHRAN, October 16 (RIA Novosti) - The five Caspian Sea littoral states [Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan] adopted a declaration at their second summit on Tuesday in Tehran, pledging to deny access to third countries who intend to use force against any Caspian state.

Just as in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, the Washington air is thick with unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction; demonisation of the country's president has reached bizarre proportions; intelligence leaks about links with al-Qaida and attacks on US and British targets are now routine; demands for war from the administration's neoconservative outriders are becoming increasingly strident; the pronouncements of George Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, are turning ever more belligerent - and administration sources claim that the British government is privately ready to play ball.

Ernest Hemingway explained the problem many years ago. The first thing politicians do to hide their mismanagement, he said, is inflate the currency; the second thing they do is go to war.

Our currency has been inflated and we are at war. The demonization of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which you saw take place in New York City and on American television, is just the first step in preparing the country for a third war.

It appears that the US is planning an attack against Iran and [Canada] is pitching in to help...Canada has...worked to de-legitimate Iran at the UN, putting forward a resolution condemning Iran's human rights record...Canada has also been accused of spying for the US...[L]ast year, members of the Iranian parliament claimed the Canadian embassy in Tehran was a "den of spies."

...[T]he ground work is being prepared for yet another rescue story similar to that used to justify the Afghan war. The rescue story has two components: a brutal or “evil” dictator and an oppressed population. Not so coincidentally, two images of Iran have dominated the media landscape over the last few weeks. One is that of the “new Hitler” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has been represented as personifying pure “evil.” The other is of an emaciated Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian American scholar, who was detained by the Iranian government and recently released.