The drums of war will beat very softly at first. There will be a few stories about matters which should be familiar to Americans from the preliminaries that preceded the Iraq war. The corporate media will attempt to again inspire fear in the American people with stories of weapons of mass destruction in Iran. They will concentrate on nuclear weapons production. Iran's leaders will be demonized using the standard propaganda techniques. Stories will probably appear illustrating contacts between Al-Qaida and Iran. The US military may initiate belligerent military exercises in the area in an attempt to create an incident justifying invasion or bombing. If that doesn't succeed a fabricated incident like the Gulf of Tonkin may be utilized. In addition, the corporate media will have new excuses, unavailable in the preliminary propaganda for the Iraq invasion. Claims can now be made about infiltration of resistance fighters across the Iran-Iraq border or weapons and material help coming from Iran to the Iraqi resistance. In the Vietnam war similar justifications were used for the US military interventions in Laos and Cambodia. If the decision for war has been made, these media excuses for war will grow from once a month or week to an everyday hammering of the senses. The sound of the war drums will grow from a faint beat to a crescendo of power and war will indeed ensue.

There are excellent reasons why a war with Iran should be next on the corporate agenda for world domination. Iran possesses a large amount of oil. The Anglo-Persian oil company, later British Petroleum, was pumping oil from wells in Iran long before they exploited the oil in Iraq. The United States has already indicated its intense interest in those oil reserves by overthrowing Mossadegh in 1953 and bringing the Shah to power. Mossadegh had angered British and American oil companies by nationalizing the oil. The Shah reprivatized it and allowed American oil companies to take full advantage of this opportunity. Since Iran's oil has been nationalized once again, an obvious motivation for war is to privatize it once more.

In my opinion, another, even larger reason for war is that Iran lies geographically directly between the US bases in Iraq and those in Afghanistan and the oil-rich republics of Central Asia. If the United States wants to dominate the oil reserves of the whole region and, therefore, have tremendous power over the economies and policies of virtually all nations, it must either instigate a coup to get a collaborating regime in power in Iran, or the US must wage war against Iran. That is why I would place Iran as a higher priority target than Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela or Syria. The neoconservatives' plan for the Middle East is terribly incomplete without domination over Iran.

Some analysts maintain that the United States is bogged down in Iraq and can't possibly fight another war. I am not so sure. Empires are known for overestimating their capabilities. Indeed, it is possible that they may wait a few years and try to stabilize Iraq, before they proceed to the next war. Americans seem to have short memories and treat each new war as something unique and divorced in causation from those preceding it. Pentagon planners have obviously visualized multiple guerrilla wars around the world or a couple of major conflicts at the same time. They may think they can use American air power to subdue countries like Iran. They were certainly successful with this technique in Yugoslavia, although it hasn't worked in Iraq as well. They may bomb Iran with thousands of tons of depleted uranium and wait patiently for years, while it does its dirty work of destroying the health, vitality and lives of people in the region. Sick, weak people with deformed children are easier to conquer than a healthy, vigorous population. Of course, it will kill American soldiers as well, but these are replaceable from a country thousands of miles away with a huge population. Mass slaughter, torture, unending war, poverty, misery and radioactive pollution of the Earth are the results of the present US policies for corporate enrichment. The drums of war must be silenced forever, before they create a terrible silence indicating the absence of the great diversity of life on Earth.