President George W. Bush's address on Iraq Wednesday night was less
about Iraq than about its eastern neighbor, Iran. There was little new
about the US's strategy in Iraq, but on Iran, the President spelled
out a plan that appears to be aimed at goading Iran into war with the
US.

While Washington speculated whether the president would accept or
reject the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, few predicted that he
would do the opposite of what James Baker and Lee Hamilton advised.
Rather than withdrawing troops from Iraq, Bush ordered an augmentation
of troop levels. Rather than talking to Iran and Syria, Bush virtually
declared war on these states. And rather than pressuring Israel to
resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the administration is
fuelling the factional war in Gaza by arming and training Fatah
against Hamas.

Several recent developments and statements indicate that the
administration is ever more seriously eyeing war with Iran. On
Wednesday, Bush made the starkest accusations yet against the rulers
in Tehran, alleging that the clerics were "providing material support
for attacks on American troops."

While promising to "disrupt the attacks on our forces" and "seek out
and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to
our enemies in Iraq," he made no mention of the flow of arms and funds
to Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda from Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Instead, he revealed the deployment of an additional carrier strike
group to the Persian Gulf and of the Patriot anti-missile defence
system to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to protect U.S.
allies. The usefulness of this step for resolving the violence in Iraq
remains a mystery. Neither the Sunni insurgents nor the Shia militias
possess ballistic missiles. And if they did, nothing indicates that
they would target the GCC states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The deployment of the Patriot missiles can be explained, however, in
light of a U.S. plan to attack Iran. Last year, Tehran signalled the
GCC states in unusually blunt language that it would retaliate against
the Arab sheikhdoms if the U.S. attacked Iran using bases in the GCC
countries. Mindful of the weakness of Iran's air force, Tehran's most
likely weapon would be ballistic missiles -- the very same weapon that
the Patriots are designed to provide a shield against. A first step
towards going to war with Iran would be to provide the GCC states with
protection against potential Iranian retaliation.

Perhaps the starkest indication of an impending war with Iran is
Washington's recent arrest of Iranian diplomats in Iraq. Around the
time of President Bush's speech, U.S. Special Forces -- in blatant
violation of diplomatic regulations reminiscent of the hostage taking
of U.S. diplomats in Tehran by Iranian students in 1979 -- stormed the
Iranian consulate in Arbil in northern Iraq, arresting five diplomats.
Later that day, U.S. forces almost clashed with Kurdish peshmerga
militia forces when seeking to arrest more Iranians at Arbil's
airport.

These operations incensed the Iraqi government, including its Kurdish
components that otherwise are staunchly pro-Washington. "What
happened... was very annoying because there has been an Iranian
liaison office there for years and it provides services to the
citizens," Iraq's Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoshiyar Zebari, who is
himself a Kurd, told Al-Arabiya television.

The Bush administration has justified the raids -- including the
arrests of several Iranian officials in December last year -- on the
grounds that evidence is collected on Iranian involvement in
destabilising Iraq. But if the purpose is intelligence gathering, it
would make more sense to launch a simultaneous mass raid of Iranian
offices rather than the current incremental approach that provides the
Iranians forewarning and an opportunity to destroy whatever evidence
they may or may not have in their possession.

The incremental raids and arrests may instead be aimed at provoking
the Iranians to respond, which in turn would escalate the situation
and provide the Bush administration with the casus belli it needs to
win Congressional support for war with Iran. Rather than making the
case for a pre-emptive war with Iran over weapons of mass destruction
-- a strategy the U.S. pursued with Iraq that is unlikely to succeed
with Iran -- the sequence of events in the provocation and escalation
strategy would make it appear as if war was forced on the U.S.

Prominent Republican and Democratic Senators seem to have picked up on
the president's war strategy. At Thursday's hearing in the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska drew
parallels with the Richard Nixon administration's strategy of lying to
the U.S. people and expanding the Vietnam war into Cambodia. "[W]hen
you set in motion the kind of policy that the president is talking
about here," he warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "it's
very, very dangerous."

Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware added that war with Iran would
require congressional authority. Still, Congress is yet to pose a
major challenge to Bush's war plan beyond holding hearings with heated
exchanges between frustrated Senators and defensive administration
officials.

The next move may be Iran's. Tehran has likely sniffed the trap and
will sit idly by for now and deprive the Bush administration of a
pretext for escalation. But continued provocations from the U.S.
through additional raids of Iranian consulates and offices will likely
lead to an intentional or unintentional response, after which
escalation and war may become reality. Iran has at times failed to
exhibit the discipline necessary to refrain from responding to
aggressions.

While the administration's calculation may be that lethal pressure on
Iran will force Tehran to compromise, faith in Iran that offering
concessions will prompt a change in the U.S.'s Iran-policy is next to
nonexistent due to the Bush administration's past rejections of
Iranian offers.

But Tehran may be able to change the political climate and escape
Bush's war trap by reinitiating talks with the European Union to
address regional matters as well as the nuclear impasse. Europe's
patience and faith in Iran has largely been depleted due to Tehran's
failure to fully appreciate efforts by Javier Solana, high
representative for the European Union's Common Foreign and Security
Policy, to negotiate an agreement on enrichment suspension last fall.

Still, the EU understands that the tidal waves of a regional war in
the Middle East will reach Europe much sooner than they reach U.S.
shores. Whether Europe will stand up for its own values and security
and against Bush's war plans, however, remains to be seen. Here,
Tehran's offers are likely not inconsequential.




[1] The National Iranian American Council is a Washington, DC-based non-partisan, non-profit educational 501 c(3) organization promoting Iranian-American participation in American civic and political life. This document is a product of NIAC’s US-Iran Media Resource Project, funded by Connect US, the Ploughshares Fund and OSI. For more information, please visit www.niacouncil.org.


[2] Dr. Trita Parsi is the President of the National Iranian American Council and the author of Treacherous Triangle - The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007.)