Provoking a new war: Added notes (corrected)

From Robert Parry:

At a not-for-quotation pre-speech briefing on Jan. 10, George W. Bush and his top national security aides unnerved network anchors and other senior news executives with suggestions that a major confrontation with Iran is looming.

Commenting about the briefing on MSNBC after Bush’s nationwide address, NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert said “there’s a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue – in the country and the world – in a very acute way.”...

“The President’s inference was this: that an entire region would blow up from the inside, the core being Iraq, from the inside out,” Williams said, paraphrasing Bush.

From a Daily Kos poster named hilage:

Five days ago I had dinner with one of the officers on a ship in one the carrier groups heading to the Gulf. He is an officer who has served at the Pentagon and spent time training at the War College. He is not a gung-ho type, rather he is the type of considered, intelligent officer who gives you hope for the military and pride in our country. Like all of us here and DKos he thinks the war is a huge mistake for many reasons. But during converstaion, the subject of casualties in Iraq came up and his wife began looking nervous so I said, "Well, at least Iraq has no Air Force." The officer turned to me with a look that suggested I was the dumbest person on the planet and said, very slowly and clearly, "Yes, but Iran does."

From Trita Parsi's important new piece for IPS, "Bush's Iraq Plan - Goading Iran into War" (thanks to Larisa):

While promising to "disrupt the attacks on our forces" and "seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq," he [Bush] made no mention of the flow of arms and funds to Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda from Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Instead, he revealed the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf and of the Patriot anti-missile defence system to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to protect U.S. allies. The usefulness of this step for resolving the violence in Iraq remains a mystery. Neither the Sunni insurgents nor the Shia militias possess ballistic missiles. And if they did, nothing indicates that they would target the GCC states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The deployment of the Patriot missiles can be explained, however, in light of a U.S. plan to attack Iran. Last year, Tehran signalled the GCC states in unusually blunt language that it would retaliate against the Arab sheikhdoms if the U.S. attacked Iran using bases in the GCC countries.

Patriot defense missiles probably cannot protect against the new generation of Sunburn cruise missiles, which an easily take out that ship in the Persian Gulf on which the friend of "hilage" now serves.

The attack on the Iranian consulate, and the attempt to kidnap Iranians at the airport in Kurdistan, might well have provoked a missile attack on an American vessel. The result: Regional war -- World War III. Remember how the last war in Lebanon began? Israel prodded a perceived enemy into taking defensive measures, then claimed to the world that defense was really offense, thereby justifying invasion.

We all know how Israel's Lebanese misadventure ended.

I'm surprised this scenario has not played out already -- especially since there appears to be a faction within the Iranian leadership itself in league with the neocons.

What's your read on American opinion? If a Sunburn sinks the USS Eisenhower, will the public blame Bush -- or will the public's mood revert to "September 12, 2001" mode?

(Note: The original version of this piece mistakenly used the term "Sunfire" instead of Sunburn." For a frightening overview of this weapon, see this article -- which also explains why any American ship in the Persian Gulf is in an indefensible position.)