Will Israel attack Iran or will the US?

Those who mastermind the US-directed psychological operation against Iran have obliviously forgotten that we're now accustomed to seeing the uninteresting, exhausting charade of "… will attack Iran": you put the subject for it, it could be either the United States or Israel.

During the past five years the mainstream media have constantly talked of Iran being under the threat of an imminent war: a war against Tehran to overthrow the Islamic Republic and to bring to power a "democratic" regime which the "international community" favours.

Since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assumed office as the Iranian head of state in 2005, he has made attempts to reverse the passive and submissive stance of Iran towards the Eastern and Western superpowers and has proposed new theories for an innovative international order. He has accelerated Iran's nuclear program and made remarkable advancements in nationalising the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Iran.

He has put forward insightful and astute questions like, "why should Israel possess nuclear weapons in violation of the international law"; "why should Israel occupy the lands which don't belong to it"; "why should Israel repeatedly threaten its neighbours and wage wars against them"; "why should [the] Holocaust be used as a pretext to suppress the Palestinian nation?"; and "why should Iran be deprived of the peaceful uses of nuclear power while the United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom and China have thousands of nuclear weapons?"

These questions were not digestible for the United States and its stalwart allies around the world; therefore, it was said, some measures should be adopted to suffocate this man and the people he represents. The reason was simple. Ahmadinejad and Iran would not make concessions and thus should be silenced at any cost.

So, who is going to pay the price for silencing Iran? Are the military options plausible?

The answer is simply "no". Iran is different from Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the countries which Israel has attacked during its period of existence in the Middle East. The people of Iran have demonstrated that they react to the aggressive powers categorically. So, the best option for the world’s super powers would be to stage an all-out psychological operation in which the means of coercion, falsification, distortion, fabrication and intimidation might be used.

The project started almost five years ago, when the US and European mainstream media gradually began trumpeting for war against Iran. The first man to set in motion the project was Scott Ritter, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He told the media on February 19, 2005 that George W. Bush was laying the groundwork for an all-out attack against Iran: "President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons."

With what was described as Ritter's "greatest scepticism", he also talked of the possibility of a regime change in Iran, pushed by the neoconservatives who were trying to persuade then President Bush to broaden the extent of war to topple the Islamic Republic.

The primary threats looked so realistic that they even deceived veteran investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, who wrote in a January 24, 2005 article in the New Yorker that the US was getting prepared to launch a military strike against Iran. He quoted a high-ranking intelligence official as telling him: “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah - we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

In 2006, the gossips were strongly suggesting that there'll be an attack against Iran, either by Israel or the United States. In August 2006, the former chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Major General Hamid Gul emphatically proclaimed that Iran will be attacked by the United States. Interestingly, he also specified the exact time of the attack. Talking to the Pakistani Parliament, he predicted that "America would definitely attack Iran and Syria simultaneously in October."

Along with the previous predictions, however, General Gul's prediction about an imminent assault on Iran transpired to be futile.