Powerful political forces in Washington are fishing for a pretext
 to launch a war on Iran, and that they are just delighted to have Ahmadinejad as cartoon villain and  pretext. But they had a moderate, reforming president in Mohammad Khatami for 8 years, and just blew off all his overtures to the West. Iranians organized big candle-light vigils for America after September 11, in sympathy!

Washington never gave the reform movement the slightest encouragement, perhaps in hopes that the Iranians would be forced to turn right again and form a proper object of US hatred. If so, they got their wish last summer, when Ahmadinejad used the same dirty techniques to get elected as had George W. Bush.

All the warmongers in Washington should get this through their heads. Americans are not fighting any more wars in the Middle East against toothless third rate powers.

We are not going to see any more US troops come home in body bags at Dover for the sake of some Cheney affiliate grabbing the petroleum in Iran's Ahvaz fields.





We are not going to have another 37,000 wounded vets flood onto our streets with spine damage and brain damage.



                                                                                                                                                 

 

 

 

We are not going to put Yazd behind barbed wire to liberate it, as a millenarian Christian general did to Habbaniyah in Iraq.



We are not going to imprison and torture thousands of Iranians at Evin Penitentiary in Tehran, as worthy successors to the bloodthirsty Shah and Khomeini.






 

 

We are not going to kill 200,000 Iranians with aerial bombardments of Tabriz, Isfahan, Qom, Kerman, Shiraz and Mashahd.




 

We are not going to let dozens of US corporations loot the American people and the Iranian people alike with no-bid "contracts", embezzlement, corruption, and graft.

We are not going to let you have a war against Iran.

So sit down and shut up, American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Heritage Foundation, this institute, that institute, cable "news",  government "spokesmen," and all the pundit-ferrets for the American military-industrial complex and Big Oil.

We don't give a rat's ass what Ahmadinejad thinks or what pissant speech he gives.

I call on university students across America to begin holding antiwar rallies. The only way you can have a war on Iran is to draft young people. It is you who are on the line. Demonstrate! Demonstrate against the very hint of war! Demonstrate in front of the warmongering "institutes" in Washington, DC! Demonstrate to end the one we've already got! (See Speaker's Forum on Iraq

Here is what the real Iran experts think about the prospect of an Iran war.

These dirty tricks and lies are only the beginning. Whoever stands against the Perpetual War machine will be attacked, slimed, marginalized, and destroyed if the warmongers get their way.

Juan Cole {abridged)