Iran up next

And, as you know, not North Korea.

“North Korea is quite capable of responding to any kind of military action that we take with a devastating attack, an artillery and missile barrage on the South that would inflict millions of deaths and casualties,” said Michele A. Flournoy, who was a Pentagon strategist in the Clinton administration.

“Unlike Iran, North Korea poses not just a potential threat but an actual threat today,” said Flournoy, now a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

[...]

Daniel Goure, a former Defense Department official in the first Bush administration, said there’s another reason for the different treatment of Iran and North Korea: Iran might be more persuadable by strong words than North Korea.

“North Korea is a basket-case state. It’s a total rogue regime. I don’t think that when you look at the nature of the regime, any of the proposals for how to work a deal are credible,” said Goure. “But I think there is a view in the administration that Iran can change. The mullahs are not forever. Iran may be radical and difficult, but it is not crazy.”
  article

Who will join North Korea in the Axis of Crazies?

Of course, there are problems with Iran, as well.

US intelligence is unlikely to know much about Iran’s contentious nuclear programme and could be vulnerable to manipulation for political ends, former intelligence officers and other experts say.

Amid an escalating war of words between Washington and Tehran, the experts say they doubt the CIA has been able to recruit agents with access to the small circle of clerics who control the Islamic Republic’s national security policy.

[...]

“I will be highly remarkably surprised if the United States has (intelligence) assets in the organs of power,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“They don’t even know who the second-tier Revolutionary Guards are,” he added. Doubts about US intelligence on Iran have arisen amid talk of possible military strikes by the United States or Israel against suspected nuclear weapons facilities.

Former chief weapons inspector David Kay, the first to declare US intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a failure, warned that the Bush administration is again relying on evidence from dissidents, as it did in pre-war Iraq.
  Daily Times article

Actually, that got them what they wanted - entry. The truth was not important. In fact, it was an obstacle.

National intelligence estimate: “We’re talking about military action against Iran and we don’t have a national intelligence estimate that shows what we do know, what we don’t know and the basis for what we think we know,” Kay said.

[...]

Richard Perle, the influential neo-conservative thinker who was a driving force behind the US-led invasion of Iraq, said intelligence suffered a major setback in Iran with the arrest of about 40 agents in the mid-1990s.

“As I understand it, virtually our entire network in Iran was wiped out,” Perle recently told the House of Representatives intelligence committee.

“I think we’re in very bad shape in Iran,” he said. Some intelligence analysts argue a pre-emptive strike is the only way to delay Iranian nuclear-weapons production, despite the Bush administration’s public emphasis on diplomacy.

At least they're thinking ahead about what to use as a reason for invasion. This is a fool-proof one. We are attacking precisely because we don't know what their capabilities are. And we can still use the "they're thinking about building WMD" argument.

The task of recruiting useful agents in Iran faces immense hurdles posed by a secretive decision-making hierarchy and widespread mistrust of the US government, experts said.

Unjustified, of course.

A war of words between Tehran and Washington has escalated in recent days, with Iran warning the United States against a possible attack on its nuclear facilities, which it says are for peaceful power production.

[...]

Iran on Saturday started churning out a production line of torpedoes as pressure mounts against the Islamic Republic, which Washington accuses of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, state media reported.
  Reuters article

If you threaten them long enough, then what other choice do they have but to try to build up a defense system to deter you? That's so simple, I have to wonder if that isn't part of the plan. Create a situation that is untenable for them, force them to look for deterrents to your nuclear weapons threat, and then invade them because they want to build nuclear weapons.

Oh wait. That is part of the plan.

Yesterday, on the 26th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, Iran declared, "The whole Iranian nation is united against any threat or attack. If the invaders reach Iran, the country will turn into a burning hell for them" to a crowd of tens of thousands in Teheran.

The interesting thing is that the statement came from Mohammed Khatami, the country's liberal-minded slightly pro-Western president, not from Ali Khamenei, the Islamist "hard-liner."

[...]

I think Khatami was deliberately chosen to make the statement to send a message to the neoconservatives that the very pro-democracy movement they are thinking will rise up if Iran is attacked will actually fight along with the clerics against any foreign threat. Not only do they read Seymour Hersh along with the rest of us, they can't have been happy about Condoleezza Rice saying, "I believe that everyone is telling the Iranians that they're going to have to live up to their international obligations, or next steps are in the offing. And I think everyone understands what the 'next steps' mean."
  Empire Notes post

Here's what Venezuela's Chavistas think of Condi.

Tomorrow I'll publish a post about the impression she recently made on the French when she went to Paris.