It takes a “specialist” on “Persian Gulf affairs, with special emphasis on Iran and Iraq” to get at the real reason behind the impending neocon attack on Iran.

Kenneth Katzman, who analyzes U.S. policy and legislation on the Persian Gulf region for members of Congress and their staffs, assigned to the House International Relations Committee, talks the talk across the corporate media spectrum, i.e., he is a neocon propagandist. Katzman tells us “Iran’s ascendancy is not only manageable but reversible,” that is if one “understands the Islamic republic’s many vulnerabilities,” Reuters reports.

As should be obvious by now, the neocon plan to deal with Iran’s “ascendancy” has nothing to do with nukes. It has everything to do with the fact our rulers, in particular the neocon faction, believe Iran is too big for its britches and thus will be cut down to size.

As the Clean Break boys told us a decade ago, an “effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran.” In this context, we can define “strategic initiative” as back-to-back bombing runs, wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, and plenty of mass murder and prolonged misery, and not simply along Israel’s northern border.

According to Wayne White, former top Middle East analyst for the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research, the neocon plan for mass destruction will not be limited to a “surgical strike” against phantom nuke facilities.

“I’ve seen some of the planning,” claims White. “You’re talking about a war against Iran” that likely would destabilize the Middle East for years. “We’re not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We’re talking about clearing a path to the targets” by taking out much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that would undoubtedly target “commerce” (i.e., oil tankers) or U.S. warships now parked in the Gulf, patiently waiting for a new Gulf of Tonkin incident to get the World War Four ball rolling. Mr. White, no longer attached to the State Department, is “much more worried about the consequences of a U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” and rightfully so.

Iran’s illusory nukes, not dissimilar from Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, are simply a pretext, as the idea is to “shock and awe” the target population into submission.

“The logic of targeting civilian infrastructure appears in the book from which the Bush Administration drew its bombing strategy in 2003. Military researchers at the National Defense University wrote Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance in 1996. The text suggested applying U.S. military ‘resources to controlling, affecting, and breaking the will of the adversary to resist,’” writes William Van Wagenen. “Through Shock and Awe, the authors hoped that ‘the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese’ would result. President Bush responded enthusiastically to the concept of ‘Shock and Awe’ when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld introduced it to him in the lead up to the war…. As a war against Iran may be upon us in the coming years, we need to keep in mind the effects of U.S. military tactics on civilian populations. Targeting civilians is still terrorism, whether undertaken for the best of motives or the worst.” For the neocons, nuclear “shock and awe” is perfectly acceptable, even preferable.

Meanwhile, as “speculation over whether the American President was considering a nuclear strike against Tehran grew after his remarks in which he said that the U.S. will take any steps to halt Tehran’s alleged meddling in Iraq, Democratic leaders in Congress stepped up warning against what they said were White House plans to launch an attack against the Islamic Republic without first seeking approval from Congress,” reports Alijazeera.

Note the Democrats are not opposed to attacking Iran, but rather irked by Bush’s insistence on going it alone in solitary unitary decider fashion.

“The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat version of a warmonger, complained. Reid apparently had nothing to say about the morality or sanity of such an attack.

Of course, as events unfold, any pissing contest between the unitary decider and the Democrats, the latter insulted because they are out of the neocon loop, is entirely irrelevant.

As the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis set sail for the Middle East earlier this week, marking the first time since Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq that the U.S. will have two carrier battle groups in the region, the Iranians are massing troops for the coming invasion of their country.

“Iranian troops are reportedly gathering along the border with northern Iraq,” reports United Press International this morning. “An Iraqi Kurdish source told the Kuwait News Agency, KUNA, that Iran is massing troops stationed at its main border crossing with Iraq, in Pashmakh.” DPA adds: “The Iranian soldiers were positioned east of the northern Iraqi province of Suleimaniya at the Bashmakh border station, the most important crossing between Iran and the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq…. Iranians were witnessed yelling ‘Death to America,’” a quite natural response considering the United States kidnapped Iranian diplomats in Erbil, Iraq.

“An informed source in Iraq’s northern city of Erbil said… the US raid on the Iranian consulate general and kidnapping of the Iranian diplomats has fueled the anti-American atmosphere in the region,” reports the Fars News Agency. Iran has officially complained to the UN and UN Security Council, an admittedly futile exercise.

Regardless of the concerns on the part of Tweedledee Democrats, confronting their partisan Looking Glass—or, more spot on, to quote Lewis Carroll, Tweedledum and Tweedledee “agreed to have a battle”—the neocons are moving all the pieces into place.

“The United States has signaled to Gulf Arab allies that an attack on Iran could take place in 2007,” reports the Middle East Newsline. “Diplomatic sources said the Bush administration has raised the prospect of a U.S. strike on Iran over the next few months. The sources said the discussions with Gulf Cooperation Council states have also been conducted by U.S. Central Command as well as the U.S. intelligence community.”

In addition, as now appears obvious, Condi the Destroyer trekked to the Middle East under the cover of yet another Israeli-Palestinian “peace deal” nonstarter in order to hand-deliver the message “that the GCC must get ready for any contingency.”

Increasingly, with every passing day, it becomes more obvious that the neocon plan to attack Iran will indeed occur sometime this year, more likely sooner before later as the neocon marshaled armada of warships are now convened, with the USS Stennis not far behind, ready to unleash their murderous fury on the people of Iran.