Iran 150

'Iran on the Brink: What's It Like Waiting Around to Be Bombed?
By Russ Wellen
t r u t h o u t Guest Contributor

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll showed that 65 percent of Americans endorsed diplomacy with Iran, while 10 percent favored military action. But when asked by an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll if the US should "destroy Iran's ability to construct nuclear weapons," the percentage that advocated an attack rose to 43, with 47 percent demurring.
The same poll also asked if we should attack Iran if it were found responsible for exporting roadside-bomb technology to Iraq. Those in favor were now in the majority - 55 percent - with 45 percent opposed.
The degree to which our opinions are manipulated by the introduction of mounting threats to the equation, as if from a dropper into an experiment, suggests we're unacquainted with the issue. But opinion polls are predicated on the assumption that the public is informed. However, as Christopher Shea once observed in a Salon article on the effects of voter ignorance: "Most people base their votes, and their answers to polls, on only the vaguest feelings about how the economy, or life, is treating them."
Ideally, the polls would have prefaced the above questions with another: "Are you aware that the US is considering a military strike on Iran?" To many respondents, it might have been news.
Unless you work in a foreign-policy think tank, the subject probably doesn't come up much, if at all. Meanwhile, those aware of it are likely to comfort themselves with the thought: "We'd never do that. We're already overextended in Iraq." Americans have enough trouble dealing with - or, as the case may be, screening out - one war.
We push the mute button on the drumbeat of war at our own peril. But it's even more dangerous when those in harm's way are in denial. It turns out that much of the Iranian public is tuning out the threat of an attack, too.
In his Salon article "The view from Tehran," Hooman Majd writes, "by and large [Iranian officials, as well as the public] do not believe that the United States will attack Iran, mostly because they cannot envision that the White House could be ... so foolish as to attack a country where 10-year-olds have been willing to strap grenades to their waists and run under enemy tanks [as in the Iran-Iraq war]."'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032607L.shtml