As it turns out, it does not matter if Iran “stands-down” from its attempt to enrich uranium, a suggestion made by Mohamed El Baradei, head of the IAEA, while in attendance at the elitist confab in Davos, Switzerland.

It doesn’t matter because “Iran’s uranium enrichment program has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved,” writes Peter Beaumont, citing “a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian program.”

Of course, the revelations will not stop the neocons and the Israelis from attacking the Muslim nation, as the reason for the attack has nothing to do with nukes or any possible threat Iran may or may not pose to Israel. It’s all about taking out the next “rogue nation” on the “axis of evil” roster, a laundry list of mass destruction plotted out years ago, well before Bush stumbled into office, thanks to Supreme Court appointment.

Naturally, the Guardian revelations will find their way to memory hole in short order and the Iran demonization effort, gleefully pimped by the corporate media, will continue in earnest, just as it did in 2002, as the neocons prepared to kill 650,000 Iraqis.

Iraq, after more than a decade of debilitating sanctions, claiming the lives of more than a million Iraqis, 500,000 of them children, was no more a threat to the United States than Guinea-Bissau. Saddam Hussein’s stab at Arab nationalism, and the moderate successes of Ba’ath socialism in regard to health care and education, was considered a threat to Israel, however, as Israel likes its Arab neighbors enfeebled, poverty-stricken, ruled by greedy despots, and wracked by sectarian divisions, this would not be allowed to stand.

Ditto Iran. According to Israel and the neocons, Iran is simply too proud—the primary reason it will not admit its problems with uranium enrichment—and although the country has many a problem, not least of all the alienation of young people from an austere Islamic leadership, it irks Israel that Iran’s influence is growing in the neighborhood among traditionally downtrodden Shia Muslims, kicked around once too often by arrogant Sunni Muslims, from the Gulf emirates to Lebanon and beyond. Israel hankers to knock Iran down a few notches, even by way of “tactical” nukes, if need be.

“Iran has never once moved beyond its borders in an act of aggression since the organization of the UN and widespread acceptance of the UN Charter as fundamental international law,” write Edward S. Herman and David Peterson.

This, of course, has not prevented Henry Kissinger from describing the “Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology” as a threat to the “region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend,” a threat for which the counterweight of “American forces are indispensable.” Nor has Iran’s non-aggressive history prevented a wide array of commentators from repeating the views expressed by the Director of National Intelligence in testimony before the Senate on January 11, when he warned of the “shadow” that Iran now casts across the Middle East; by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who warned of an “emboldened and strengthened Iran;” or by George Bush, who, in his two major speeches in January, warned of an Iran “emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons” (January 10), a new axis emerging “out of chaos in Iraq,…an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America” (January 23).

Indeed, Iran experienced aggression directly from the United States and Britain—and its client at the time, Iraq under Saddam Hussein—historical facts ignored by the United Nations, even though the 1953 CIA sponsored coup and Iraq’s invasion were blatant violations of the United Nations charter, essentially a worthless bit of paper to be used when and if the United States deems it necessary.

“The United States and Israel have both engaged in numerous cross-border invasions and occupations in violation of the UN Charter, most recently the United States (and Britain) attacking and occupying Iraq, and Israel bombing and invading Lebanon. The UN Security Council not only failed to do anything punitive in the face of these open violations of the UN Charter, it actually ratified the U.S. occupation,” Herman and Peterson note.

Like any well-trained domestic pet, the United Nations barks only upon command.

“Iran has not threatened to attack the United States—which it couldn’t do anyway, any more than Iraq could have attacked this country in 2003—and it has not threatened to attack Israel, although Iran has promised to retaliate for an attack against its territory, and President Ahmadinejad has made hostile remarks about Israel and expressed the wish that Israel would disappear as an apartheid state,” Herman and Peterson continue. “As noted, his statement was misrepresented by the Western media as part of the demonization process, the media also failing across the board to note the limits of Ahmadinejad’s power in Iran, and the reasons why any offensive effort by Iran against Israel would be suicidal.”

For the average person, all of this should really be a no-brainer—the idea Iran would nuke Israel, thus inviting an overwhelming response, effectively translating into suicide, makes absolutely no sense—but then, of course, Fox News, CNN, the entire corporate alphabet news media, do not deal in sanity or logic, and have apparently brainwashed millions of people, spectators and navel-gazers, who respond to complex issues with guttural simplicity, grunting in unison that Iran and the “Islamics” should be nuked, demanding their country and civilization, going back to at least 3200 BCE, be reduced to a glass parking lot, a response predicated on a series of neocon lies so transparent as to be ludicrous.

Thus Caspar Willard Weinberger, Jr., son of the late Caspar Weinberger, the Iran-Contra criminal responsible for selling weapons to Iran, indicted but pardoned by Bush Senior, tells us the “United States finally seems to be getting serious about Iran’s increasingly hostile and aggressive tendencies regarding its nuclear program and its apparent wish to dominate the whole Mideast theater.”

According to the junior Weinberger, diplomacy is for wimps and, thankfully, “we now finally seem to be responding to Ahmadinejad’s Iran in the only language he and his cronies really understand: brute strength,” that is to say the United States will brutally shock and awe Iranian grandmothers and infants, and that’ll teach ‘em to mess with us, that is to say Israel.

Never mind Iran is unable to manufacture nukes and its “hostile and aggressive tendencies” are, by and large, the manufacture of hateful neocons.

Ahmadinejad never declared Israel must be “wiped off the map,” as I have insisted here for months, and Paul Joseph Watson most recently documented.

“According to numerous different translations, Ahmadinejad never used the word ‘map,’ instead his statement was in the context of time and applied to the Zionist regime occupying Jerusalem. Ahmadinejad was expressing his future hope that the Zionist regime in Israel would fall, not that Iran was going to physically annex the country and its population,” writes Watson.

But never mind.

Bush’s neocons will get their attack, probably before June and the onset of summer, and the rest of us will get to endure World War Four, a cataclysmic event so far undefined but guaranteed to be touch each of us personally.

If the American people allow the neocons to get away with it, as they more or less allowed them to get away with invading Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of people, then, indeed, this is a nation that will ultimately deserve its fate, as the German people, after Hitler and his minions checked out, deserved their fate for not standing up and saying enough is enough and we’re not going to take anymore.