Consider the following, posted on the News for Yahoos website:

“Iran draws up plans to bomb Israel…. The deputy commander of Iran’s air force said Wednesday that plans have been drawn up to bomb Israel if the Jewish state attacks Iran, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency…. The announcement came amid rising tensions in the region, with the United States calling for a new round of U.N. sanctions against Iran over its disputed nuclear program and Israeli planes having recently overflown, and perhaps even attacked, Iranian ally Syria.”

Imagine the shoe on the other foot: Syria bombs Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona in the Negev, its German-built Dolphin-class submarines equipped with American-made Harpoon missiles modified to carry small nuclear warheads, and the Israel Institute for Biological Research at Ness Ziona, where Israel allegedly manufactures Sarin nerve gas, a weapon of mass destruction.

Now imagine the blood red 72 point headlines in the New York Times calling for turning Syria into a glass parking lot.

“On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the international community should prepare for the possibility of war in the event that Iran obtains atomic weapons, although he later appeared to soften that statement.”

Let’s turn this one on its head: “On Sunday, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara said the international community should prepare for the possibility of war due to fact Israel has nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them under the dictates of its Samson Option. In 2002, before Bush invaded Iraq, Ariel Sharon threatened to ‘a retaliatory strike … if Iraq launched a pre-emptive strike against the Jewish State before an American military campaign had got underway,’ according to the Scotsman.

In addition, according to strategic planners and analysts, Israel would certainly use its ‘weapons of mass destruction’ against Iraq in the event of an attack in response to the U.S. invasion of the country. Louis Rene Beres, Professor Department of Political Science, Purdue University, in a spring, 2001 open letter to Sharon reviewed by Israeli Insider wrote that Israel ‘must rely upon complementary nuclear and conventional forces, and upon the continuing and associated availability of critical preemption options.’ Beres suggests that Israeli nuclear deterrence has been significantly eroded and offers little protection against the irrational calculations of Islamic fanatics who see the destruction of the Zionist entity as a religious commandment. He argues that the cost of an Israeli first strike on sources of the nuclear, chemical and biological threats may be lower than waiting, hopefully, for the elimination of these threats by other means or the possibility that political agreements will reduce the likelihood of their use.”

News geared for clueless Yahoos continues:

“We have drawn up a plan to strike back at Israel with our bombers if this regime (Israel) makes a silly mistake,” Gen. Mohammad Alavi was quoted as telling Fars in an interview.

Fars confirmed the quotes when contacted by The Associated Press, but would not provide a tape of the interview. The Iranian air force had no immediate comment.

Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammed Najjar told the official IRNA news agency Wednesday that “we keep various options open to respond to threats. … We will make use of them if required.”

Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards released a statement that the nation was ready for a military confrontation.

“Iran, having passed through crises … has prepared its people for a possible confrontation against any aggression,” IRNA quoted the statement as saying.

White House press secretary Dana Perino called Alavi’s comment “unhelpful.”

“It is not constructive and it almost seems provocative,” she said. “Israel doesn’t seek a war with its neighbors. And we all are seeking, under the U.N. Security Council resolutions, for Iran to comply with its obligations.”

In other words, if Iran defends itself, this would be considered “unhelpful” for the long planned effort to slaughter untold numbers of Iranian grandmothers and grade school kids. In fact, Israel has consistently agitated for war with its neighbors, as an unbiased reading of history reveals. “The Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning,” writes the Israeli journalist Livia Rokach (Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents, Assn of Arab-Amer Univ Graduates; 3rd edition, August 1985).

“The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East…. In order to achieve this strategic purpose the following tactics were used… Large- and small-scale military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, then respectively under the control of Jordan and Egypt. These operations had a double purpose: to terrorize the populations, and to create a permanent destabilization stemming from tensions between the Arab governments and the populations, who felt they were not adequately protected against Israeli aggression… Military operations against Arab military installations in border areas to undermine the morale of the armies and intensify the regimes’ destabilization from inside their military structures… Covert terrorist operations in depth inside the Arab world, used for both espionage and to create fear, tension and instability.”

On May 26 of this year, Gordon Prather, a former physicist with the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army, wrote: “Contrary to what you’ve been told by the same folks—minus Judith Miller—who sold you on Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq, ElBaradei reports that Iran continues to be in complete compliance with its NPT Safeguards Agreement.”

In other words, neocon mouthpiece Dana Perino is lying. Imagine my surprise.

The IAEA adds: “Pursuant to its NPT Safeguards Agreement, Iran has been providing the Agency with access to declared nuclear material, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and facilities,” thus “the Agency is able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States is committed to diplomacy. But she said “it can’t be business as usual” with a country whose president has spoken of wiping Israel off the map.

For diplomacy to work, Rice said during a visit to Jerusalem, “it has to have both a way for Iran to pursue a peaceful resolution of this issue and it has to have teeth, and the U.N. Security Council and other measures are providing teeth.”

Like Hitler’s “Big Lie,” so outrageous no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously,” Rice is repeating the facile and repeatedly debunked lie that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be wiped off the map. “Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ because no such idiom exists in Persian,” notes academic blogger Juan Cole, who provided the correct translation: “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).” Of course, neocons, such as Canada’s former PM, Paul Martin, irresponsibly interpreted Ahmadinejad’s speech as a call for genocide and said “Iran’s obvious nuclear ambitions is a matter that the world cannot ignore,” in other words, the “world,” i.e., the neocons, need to kill scads of Iranian grandmothers and toddlers. Rice, as well, is calling for such mass murder, calling it part of “measures” with “teeth.”

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said his government took Iran’s “threat very seriously and so does the international community.”

“Unfortunately we are all too accustomed to this kind of bellicose, extremist and hateful language coming from Iran,” he said.

Translation: it is “bellicose, extremist and hateful language” when a threatened state declares it will defend its sovereignty and people.

Israeli warplanes in 1981 destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor being built by Saddam Hussein’s regime, and many in the region fear Israel or the U.S. could mount airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities if Tehran doesn’t bow to Western demands to cease uranium enrichment.

Iran, which says it isn’t trying to produce material for atomic bombs but rather fuel for reactors that would generate electricity, has said in the past that Israel would be the first retaliatory target for any attack. But Alavi’s comments were the first to mention specific contingency plans.

David Ochmanek, an international policy analyst with the U.S.-based RAND Corporation, said Iran has the capability to attack Israel with a limited number of ballistic missiles, but Israel could potentially inflict greater damage on Iran.

“If Israelis attacked Iran it would be with high precision weapons that could destroy military targets,” he said. “They could destroy Iran’s nuclear reactor and do damage to the enrichment.”

“The Iranian response would be quite different,” Ochmanek said. “It would be small numbers of highly inaccurate missiles and the intention would be to do this for psychological purposes rather than to destroy discrete targets. It’s an asymmetrical relationship.”

Again, uranium enrichment completely legal under the terms of the NPT, not that this matters, same as it did not matter than the French sold the Osirak reactor to the Iraqis, constructed the facility, provided technical assistance, and sold around 28 lb (12.5 kg) of 93% highly enriched uranium fuel, the usual fuel world-wide for research-type reactors at that time. It also does not matter no shortage of Europeans and Americans sold Saddam Hussein all the material he desired to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. According to former Reagan official and National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher, the United States “actively supported the Iraqi war effort [against Iran] by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required.” In 2002, I wrote (Bush Senior: Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons):

In 1982, Reagan “legalized” direct military assistance to Iraq. This resulted in more than a billion dollars in military related exports. According to Kenneth R. Timmerman (author of The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq) the US government under Reagan and Bush sold Iraq 60 Hughes MD 500 “Defender” helicopters, eight Bell Textron AB 212 military helicopters equipped for anti-submarine warfare, 48 Bell Textron 214 ST utility helicopters (sold for “recreational” purposes), and US military infra-red sensors and thermal imaging scanners (sold illegally to Iraq through a Dutch company). After the Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Agency found the following US equipment in Iraq: spectrometers, oscilloscopes, neutron initiators, high-speed switches for nuclear detonation, and other tools used to develop and manufacture nuclear weapons.

“One entire facility, a tungsten-carbide manufacturing plant that was part of the Al Atheer complex,” Timmerman told the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, “was blown up by the IAEA in April 1992 because it lay at the heart of the Iraqi clandestine nuclear weapons program, PC-3. Equipment for this plant appears to have been supplied by the Latrobe, Pennsylvania manufacturer, Kennametal, and by a large number of other American companies, with financing provided by the Atlanta branch of the BNL bank.”

[…]

The US Department of Commerce licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. The French newspaper Le Figaro, in an article published in 1998, said researchers at the Rockville, Maryland lab of the American Type Culture Collection confirmed sending anthrax samples via mail order to Iraq. After the Gulf War, Iraq made several declarations to UN weapons inspectors about how they had weaponized the anthrax sent to them by the American corporation. In 1985, the US Centers of Disease Control sent samples of an Israeli strain of West Nile virus to a microbiologist at the Basra University in Iraq. In addition, Iraq received other “various toxins and bacteria,” including botulins and E. coli.

And then—not that it matters to amnesiac Americans—the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran during the so-called Iran-Contra scandal, with Israel acting as a middle man and facilitator, a blatant violation of the Arms Export Control Act. Interestingly, the fanatical neocon Iran hater, Michael Ledeen, who now calls for mass murdering Iranian school children, played an instrumental role in these illegal transactions. Instead of spending his golden years in federal prison, Ledeen works for the American Enterprise Institute, where he calls for killing Iranians in broken record fashion.

But never mind.

Tensions have been raised by a mysterious Israeli air incursion over Syria on Sept. 6. Israel has placed a tight news blackout on the reported incident, while Syria has said little. U.S. officials said it involved an airstrike on a target.

One U.S. official said the attack hit weapons heading for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, an ally of Syria and Iran, but there also has been speculation the Israelis hit a nascent nuclear facility or were studying routes for a possible future strike on Iran.

Former Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday he was involved “from the beginning” in the alleged airstrike, the first public mention by an Israeli leader about the incident. Netanyahu, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, did not give further details.

Hardly surprising, as Bibi Netanyahu is a world class war criminal and Arab-hating Jabotinskyite of the most fanatical order. It should be noted that few if any members of the corporate media, so eager to suck up to Bibi when he comes to town—basking in his mass murder aura—called the attack against Syria for what it was: an in-your-face violation of national sovereignty.

Edward Djerejian, founding director of Rice University’s Baker Institute, said the accusation that Israel had violated Syrian airspace, and possibly launched an attack on Syrian territory, was putting new concerns on an already tense situation.

“The region is very nervous,” said Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Syria.

No, you think? But then this nervousness is precisely what the neocons want. “As we undertake these efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere, occasionally by force of arms but generally not, generally by influence, by standing up for brave students in the streets of Tehran, we will hear people say, from President Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt or from the Saudi royal family, that we are making them very nervous,” declared James “World War IV” Woolsey, a sickeningly arrogant and despicable neocon and former CIA director. “And our response should be, ‘Good. We want you nervous. We want you to change, but realize that now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, the democracies are on the march. And we are on the side of those whom you most fear: your own people.’”

Actually, the people of Iran probably fear suffering a mirror image of Iraq—civilian infrastructure in ruins, child mortality and disease rates rocketing skyward, precious little electricity or clean water, millions of people dying from leukemia and other cancers, thanks to depleted uranium and other lethal side effects of “democracy,” neocon style.

With Iran adding to the talk of military options, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns called Wednesday for U.N. Security Council members and U.S. allies to help push for a third round of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

But Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Moscow opposes new sanctions, adding they could hurt a recent agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency aimed at resolving questions about the Iranian program.

Two U.N. resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran have failed to persuade the country to suspend uranium enrichment.

Burns said he would host a Friday meeting of the Security Council’s permanent members—the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France. Talks on a new resolution are also expected next week in New York, when world leaders attend the annual ministerial session of the U.N. General Assembly.

Call it a rerun, so pathetically reminiscent of the transparent neocon one act plays conducted on the United Nations stage, primarily to lend a gleam of legitimacy to a series of war crimes. In fact, the neocons do not want sanctions against Iran—they want to flatten the country and kill as many Iranians as possible—and this time around they will not take their manufactured lies to the United Nations, as they ordered Colin Powell to present his ludicrous dog and pony show, complete with charts and test tubes.

In the waning hours of the Bush administration, they will simply attack Iran and leave the mess for Hillary to clean up.