Iran 95

De krant die excusus aanbod aan haar lezers vanwege het feit dat het in alle leugens van de neoconservatieven was getrapt voorafgaand aan de oorlog in Irak, doet het dit maal voorlopig wat rustiger aan met de propaganda van de Bush-regering over Iran. De New York Times bericht:

'On Iran, Bush Faces Haunting Echoes of Iraq.

Washington - As President Bush and his aides calibrate how directly to confront Iran, they are discovering that both their words and their strategy are haunted by the echoes of four years ago - when their warnings of terrorist activity and nuclear ambitions were clearly a prelude to war.
This time, they insist, it is different.
"We're not looking for a fight with Iran," R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for policy and the chief negotiator on Iranian issues, said in an interview on Friday evening, just a few hours after Mr. Bush had repeated his warnings to Iran to halt "killing our soldiers" and to stop its drive for nuclear fuel.
Mr. Burns, citing the president's words, insisted that Washington was committed to "a diplomatic path" - even as it executed a far more aggressive strategy, seizing Iranians in Iraq and attempting to starve Iran of the money it needs to revitalize a precious asset, its oil industry.
Mr. Burns argues that those are defensive steps that are not intended to provoke Iran, though there has been a vigorous behind-the-scenes debate in the administration over whether the more aggressive policy could provoke Iran to strike back. The State Department has tended to counsel caution, while some more hawkish aides in the Pentagon and the White House say the increase in American forces in Iraq could be neutered unless the American military forcefully pushes back against the Iranian aid to the militias.
To many in Washington, especially Mr. Bush's Democratic critics, the new approach to Iran has all the hallmarks of an administration once again spoiling for a fight.
Some see an attempt to create a diversion, focusing the country's attention away from a war gone bad in Iraq, and toward a country that has exploited America's troubles to expand its influence. Others suspect an effort to shift the blame for the spiraling chaos in Iraq, as a steady flow of officials, from the C.I.A. director to the new secretary of defense, cite intelligence that Iranians are smuggling into Iraq sophisticated explosive devices and detailed plans to wipe out Sunni neighborhoods. So far, they have disclosed no evidence. Next week, American military officials are expected to make their most comprehensive case - based on materials seized in recent raids - that Iran's elite Quds force is behind many of the most lethal attacks.
But as they present their evidence, some Bush administration officials concede they are confronting the bitter legacy of their prewar distortions of the intelligence in Iraq. When speaking under the condition of anonymity, they say the administration's credibility has been deeply damaged, which would cast doubt on any attempt by Mr. Bush, for example, to back up his claim that Iran's uranium enrichment program is intended for bomb production.
"It's never stated explicitly, but clearly we can't make the case about Iran's intentions," said a senior strategist for the Bush administration who joined it long after evidence surfaced that Iraq had none of the illicit weapons that the administration cited as a reason to go to war.
It has not helped that even as the administration is making its case against Iran, the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, was opening just a few blocks away.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012807C.shtml Of:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/world/middleeast/28iran.html?hp&ex=1170046800&en=
60f08fc4fca49c8b&ei=5094&partner=homepage