“I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran,” Hersh writes. And he explains that the preparations are already under way. “The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer,” he writes. “Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids.”

Hersh adds that “the Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated.”

This is not a total surprise, since Bush placed Iran in the Axis of Evil, and some neoconservatives have been eager to go after Iran for quite a while, as Chris Toensing reports in the February cover story of The Progressive.

As the invasion of Iraq was being planned, some neoconservatives were boasting that “real men want to go to Tehran,” Toensing says. “Many neoconservatives—especially those who remain in orbit around Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney—are itching for a fight.”

But it’s a fight that the United States may wish it never started. The Iranian people are more opposed to a U.S. invasion than the Iraqis were, and the Iranian military is much stronger than Saddam’s.

In the December issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows wrote a story entitled “Will Iran Be Next?” For that article, he assembled a group of former U.S. security officials to conduct a “war game” about Iran. The result of that war game was ugly: Any military action by the United States or Israel against Iran would create a huge mess. No assault could knock out all of Iran’s weapons, since the regime has dispersed them, and Iran would likely retaliate against U.S. forces in Iraq.

Toensing makes the same point in his article. He quotes a Tehran University political science professor named Hadi Semati, who says the Iranian regime would “make life as miserable as possible for the Americans in Iraq.”

And Gary Sick, who was Jimmy Carter’s Iran expert at the National Security Council, tells Toensing that U.S. troops would face a much fiercer resistance in Iran. “If you like Iraq, you’re going to love Iran,” Sick says, mordantly.

But Bush keeps rattling the sword. Monday on NBC News he said of the Iranian situation: “I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table.”

Now you may ask yourself, why in the world is Bush planning war against Iran when the war against Iraq is going so badly?

The answer is, the Bush folks are so deluded that they think Bush’s reelection was a vote not only for the Iraq War but for the neoconservatives who hatched it, Hersh reports.

And those neoconservatives are in a hurry to accomplish their goals before Bush’s four years are up. “This is the last hurrah,” one former high intelligence official told Hersh.

Delusion plus recklessness plus enormous power is going to equal disaster in Iran, even more so than in Iraq.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are dead set on disaster squared.

© 2005 The Progressive