As reported by the January 12 New York Times, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice admitted that George W. Bush authorized the raid of the Iranian liaison office in Irbil, Iraq, and that the raid was part of a broad military offensive against Iran ordered by Bush several months ago.

The Iranian government’s response to these raids, material seized by US forces in this raid, and whatever results from the arrest and detainment of five Iranians, will be used as the pretext to launch the long-anticipated Anglo-American war on Iran.

For months, Iran has been targeted by the Bush administration as a nuclear weapons threat, despite the fact that Iran has been in full compliance with nuclear non-proliferation treaties, and is not manufacturing nuclear weapons.

This pretext, which the administration has wielded with mixed results, is now being "sexed up" with the new terrorism pretext that Iran is responsible for the violence in Iraq.

Iran, according to the Bush administration’s Orwellian rubric, is "supplying sophisticated weapons" to forces within Iraq, and that these weapons are being used against US troops. Iranians, according to Bush-Cheney-Rice, are engaging in "violent activities", fomenting "terrorism" against the US in Iraq. Iran, according to the administration, has "ambitions" in Iraq that must be "contained". Iran is "al-Qaeda", and vice versa. The US is "defending itself". Meanwhile, the continuous Anglo-American destabilization of Iran, intense covert operations underway for years, is officially denied.

As was the case in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq, evidence supporting the Bush administration lie is being manufactured out of whole cloth, or cooked up from half-truths. Facts, words, and actions are being distorted, realities turned upside down. Lies are being repeated in drumbeat fashion, and cemented into war policy.

The Bush administration buildup towards Iran is strikingly similar to Hitler’s campaign against Poland, and the Third Reich’s eventual 1939 blitzkrieg. Hitler’s final act was to manufacture a "deliberate and cold-blooded provocation", to be blamed on the Poles, which would bring down the vengeance of German armed forces. He accomplished this by putting drugged prisoners from a nearby concentration camp into Polish uniforms and shooting them near a radio station inside the German border. The "Polish attack on the Gleiwitz transmitter" marked the official start of World War Two.

In Hitler’s words, "I shall give the propagandist cause for starting the war. Never mind if it is implausible or not." So it has been since 2001 with the George W. Bush administration, whose atrocities easily dwarf those of Hitler. The potential destruction is planetary in scale.

Critical mass towards war with Iran has been achieved. It is unlikely that any resistance will come from a complicit United Nations that is a surrogate of the United States. Objections from Iranian and Iraqi officials, who will correctly file diplomatic complaints about the illegality of US actions, will be ignored, no matter how strident these complaints become.

The US Congress, regardless of its wrangling over the Bush administration’s management of the Iraq occupation, the US "loss" in Iraq, largely supports the neutering of Iran, by broad bipartisan consensus. The US Congress, including the Democrats supposedly opposing Bush, knows that the military bases in Iraq and the Middle East being built are permanent, and it knows why.

The mushrooming Iran crisis continues to unfold almost precisely as being predicted by seasoned observers such as former arms inspector Scott Ritter, whose book, Target: Iran, is reading like a play-by-play. US forces, including US Navy carrier groups, are mobilizing in the Persian Gulf region for aerial bombardment, and more. Israel, fresh off of its war against Lebanon (a dress rehearsal for Iran), is ready to act.

In the span of just the past few days, the Bush administration has clearly ratcheted up rhetoric and violence. In addition to the Irbil raid, the US attacked another resource-rich sovereign nation, Somalia, using the pretext of an anti-"terror" operation against "al-Qaeda militants". This action, now considered by the Bush administration to be a "blueprint" for the future, was widely ignored in the US press. In his latest televised address, broadcasted just hours before the Irbil raid, George W. Bush issued new and more open provocations against Iran and Syria, declaring that any halt of his murderous war would be "dangerous." Bush’s virtual promise of a war on Iran is being ignored, while almost all of Washington lock-focuses on Iraq, and Iraq troop levels.

A war on Iran renders this debate moot. So does reality. The world’s elites know that the Anglo-American empire is losing the world resource war.

Moves by powerful elements that are dissatisfied and alarmed by the Bush administration policy, exemplified by the Iraq Study Group, have accomplished nothing. Upon taking over from Donald Rumsfeld, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, an Iran-Contra conspirator and member of the Iraq Study Group, has already been reduced to a compliant Bush administration functionary, and an ineffective damage control agent. Gates slinked before Congress, and the cameras, to sell Bush’s Iraq troop escalation, while vaguely suggesting a future reduction if short-term operations are "successful.". This could be a ridiculous political charade (by adding 21,000 US troops to Iraq now, and cutting from this number later, the administration will then declare that they are "bringing troops home", while actually maintaining, or increasing, actual troop levels). Or, Gates knows that those troops will be needed when war with Iran breaks out in earnest.

The neocons led by Bush-Cheney-Rice are hell-bent on forcing their original and only geostrategic plan, "finishing the job" of a conquest of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Horn of Africa and a nuclear holocaust, during their remaining two years in power.