US and Israeli threats point to the danger of a new military conflagration in the Middle East.
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Speaking at Columbia University Sunday, US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, declared that the Pentagon was continuously planning for a military strike against Iran and stands ready to strike if that is the president’s “call.” But he warned, “striking” can “generate unintended consequences that are difficult to predict.” Later Mullen added, “If there was an easy answer, we would’ve picked it off the shelf.”
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During the past decade, Washington has ratcheted up its pressure against Iran—through the invasions and occupations of the neighboring states of Iraq and Afghanistan, through a program of economic sanctions, and by lending support to opposition groups, from Balochi nationalist terrorists to the bourgeois opposition Green movement.
In the final years of the Bush administration, the US political and military-security establishment engaged in an acrimonious debate as to whether to attack Iran.
What has thus far stayed the hand of the Obama administration—which has continued the war in Iraq, dramatically expanded the “AfPak” War, and that in its recent nuclear-weapons strategy statement refused to exclude using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear Iran—is the recognition that there can be no successful “surgical strike” against Iran.
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/pers-a20.shtml
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