While We Were Looking At Sen. Craig's Shoes...

Bush declared war on Iran.

In particularly muscular language, Bush cited recent evidence of Iranian weapons in Iraq and renewed his demand that the Iranian leadership halt support for attacks on U.S. troops.

"Until it does, I will take the actions necessary to protect troops," he said. "I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." [...]

The president noted that U.S.-led forces had seized 240-millimeter rockets manufactured in Iran that were "provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents" and said that attacks with Iranian-supplied munitions had increased recently.

"The Iranian regime must halt these actions," Bush said.

Actually, he was far more direct than that, he warned of a nuclear holocaust if Iran wasn't held to account. This is the same playbook that led us into war with Iran; more vigorous rhetoric as the summer winds down, hyping a nuclear threat, talk that we can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.

Meanwhile, Raw Story indicates that the US is able to engage in a massive military strike on Iran, which should end the "you and what Army" talk when thoughts turn to how an attack would take place.

The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.

The paper, "Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East" – written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament – was exclusively provided to RAW STORY late Friday under embargo [...]

Plesch and Butcher examine "what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action" and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a "massive" attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.
Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact.

• US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.

• US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice.

• Some form of low level US and possibly UK military action as well as armed popular resistance appear underway inside the Iranian provinces or ethnic areas of the Azeri, Balujistan, Kurdistan and Khuzestan. Iran was unable to prevent sabotage of its offshore-to-shore crude oil pipelines in 2005.

• Nuclear weapons are ready, but most unlikely, to be used by the US, the UK and Israel. The human, political and environmental effects would be devastating, while their military value is limited.

• Israel is determined to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons yet has the conventional military capability only to wound Iran’s WMD programmes.

There is no doubt that this is what the Bush Administration wants to do. They are just trying to roll out the product. A botched Gulf of Tonkin incident yesterday will surely be followed by ones that are more well-designed. And of course, this rhetoric has provoked equally strong rhetoric from Ahmadinejad (the two demagogues need each other).

"The political power of the occupiers is collapsing rapidly," Ahmadinejad said at a news conference, referring to U.S. troops in Iraq. "Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region. Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation."

I know that Larry Craig is not gay and has never been gay, but can we focus on this for a minute? The President means to start a third war to deflect from his two failed ones. He has been amassing the capability to do it and is busily catapulting the propaganda. This is real.