Slouching toward D-day

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"The war clock is ticking for the United States, both in Iraq and with Iran. The US-maneuvered United Nations deadline for Iran to stop its uranium-enrichment program is now less than two weeks away. On February 21, the UN's nuclear watchdog will report on whether Iran has heeded the Security Council's demand to stop enriching uranium - to date it has not.......

In reality, the mood in Tehran is increasingly grim. Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, positively scared state-TV viewers - a rarity in media-controlled Iran - when he said the US will try to strike Iran and he's willing to "become a martyr". It's as if Tehran has finally drawn the implications of a two-pronged hardcore militarization of the eastern Mediterranean region. On the one hand there is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allied with Israel against Syria, on the other the Persian Gulf, where the US is lining up against Iran......

The Pentagon's new batch of "warrior intellectuals" and counterinsurgency aces dripping with PhDs have begun their Baghdad strike - but so has the Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance), which, according to the Islammemo website, is now polishing its own counter-plan against "Safavid-American aggression". "Safavids" is a common Sunni reference to the Persian dynasty that converted Iraq to Shi'ism in the 16th century. The resistance plan is a mirror image of the Pentagon's. It also divides the capital into military sectors under a central command. Shoulder-fired missiles will be downing more CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters in (still Sunni) western Baghdad - as happened on Wednesday.....

Every major player also knows that the chain of pretexts is already established: the shaky Maliki government fails to meet the United States' security "benchmarks" (as it certainly will); Iran is set up for the fall; Washington engineers a provocation in the Persian Gulf; the path is cleared for a Congress-approved "defensive" US strike. Democrats in Congress are doing little to prevent the escalation, when they could at least organize themselves to torpedo the "use of force" authorization for Iraq and pass a law preventing the Bush administration from attacking Iran. Russia, China and the European (dis)Union also remain paralyzed......."