These are strange and frightening times! It seems to be that human life is being devalued by those with influence and power and what's worse their message that mass death and destruction is somehow acceptable to achieve an end-goal is seeping into the psyches of ordinary people.
On Sunday, the controversial former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told delegates attending the British Conservative Party's annual conference that in his view Iran's nuclear facilities should be bombed and regime-change effected.
Coming out of the mouth of such an abrasive, neoconservative that sentiment is hardly surprising. What is shocking, however, is the fact he was cheered and not jeered.
Thankfully, not all British politicians are as jingoistic. An all-party group of six members of Parliament was stunned by the words of a senior Defense Department official Debra Cagan, who reportedly told them that she hated all Iranians.
One of the British visitors told the Mail on Sunday of his alarm "that some in America are looking for an excuse to attack Iran".
Republican Presidential hopeful Mayor Rudy Giuliani is running primarily on an anti-terrorism platform and has indicated his willingness to use nuclear weapons to attack Iran.
Even more telling is the fact Giuliani - a Republican frontrunner - has hired the neoconservative ideologue Norman Podhoretz - author of "World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism" - as his campaign's foreign policy adviser.
An article in the Sunday Times by Sarah Baxter reveals that Podhoretz privately met with George Bush in New York last spring when he urged the American president to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.
"You have the awesome responsibility to prevent another holocaust. You are the only one with the guts to do it," he allegedly said.
Tim Shipman, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, says, "American diplomats have been ordered to compile a dossier detailing Iran's violations of international law that some fear could be used to justify military strikes against the Islamic Republic's nuclear program".
This instruction apparently emanates from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, who according to his former neocon Middle East adviser David Wurmser has considered asking Israel to launch a limited strike on Iran's Natanz site in hopes Iran's subsequent reaction might give the US an excuse to hurl itself into the fray.
Worryingly, that report may hold water. On Sept. 27, the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné ran a front-page story suggesting Israel will strike first on Oct. 15 with the US joining a second wave of attacks. It contends the Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned Tehran of the plan.
The vitriol directed at Iran from the US was never more in evidence than during President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to New York. There, he was painted as the face of evil incarnate by the right-wing media for his wish to lay a wreath at Ground Zero to honor the fallen.
The furor was such that he might as well have said he wanted to throw a bomb instead of flowers. Forgotten were the thousands of Iranians who lit candles and sent condolence messages to Americans in the aftermath of 9-11, and forgotten were statements of sympathy from the Iranian government.
The Iranian leader was then treated as a pariah rather than an invited guest by Columbia's president Lee Bollinger, who viciously attacked his guest speaker even before he had a chance to open his mouth. Bollinger, of course, was attempting to protect his own back.
He imagined he would be lauded for calling Ahmadinejad "a petty and cruel dictator" to his face while internationally Bollinger is now perceived as a rude lout, lacking in manners and hospitality.
Bollinger's crude behavior was such that, by contrast, the Iranian leader came across as dignified and composed; almost Gandhi-like with his peace, love and brotherhood message.
The problem is those who want to bomb Iran don't want a Gandhi or even an Ahmadinejad. According to the New Yorker's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigate journalist Seymour Hersh, they need a Hitler.
"We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people," he recently told the German magazine Der Spiegel. "We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khruschchev and Mao and, of course, Stalin...and now we have this guy Ahmadinejad," he said.
Haven't we seen this all before?
Wasn't Saddam Hussein painted as a Hitler before the 2003 invasion of his country? Do you recall how the embedded press toured the torture rooms at Abu Ghraib prison during those early days of the war - rooms that were later to be used by American guards for the same gruesome purpose?
Do you remember how video clips were churned out by US networks of Kurds who had been gassed and how anyone who had anything nasty to say about Saddam were permitted endless column inches in Western papers?
Unfortunately for the "bomb, bomb Iran" brigade there are no convenient clips with which to demonize the Iranian leadership. There is no evidence that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons according to the nuclear watchdog the IAEA, and Iran has no history of military belligerency. Moreover, Iran has never threatened the West, except in terms of retaliation for an attack on it.
This is why they are presently scratching around for excuses to act outside international law which hangs on the principle of self-defense, and trying to find a way of evading the UN route - blocked due to Russia and China's power of veto.
And this is exactly why Israel's initial participation may be crucial to their plan. When and if the deed is done, Israel will say that Iran was an existential threat and it had no choice but to act. The US government will say it was our duty to protect our No. 1 Middle East ally Israel and, thus, we had no choice.
In reality this is just another mega scam. The tragedy is so many so-called intelligent people are falling for it. "You'd think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possible do the same dumb thing again," said Seymour Hersh when asked about a possible looming war with Iran.
One would think so, but in this topsy-turvy twilight zone of our post-9/11, world nothing can be taken for granted and little is what it seems.
