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Rollout to War with Iran: An Update

Update to update: At DailyKos, Maccabee, under the title ”We’re Going to Hit Iran. Big Time” relays a phone conversation with a Marine Liaison Signal Officer on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf:

She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth.

This on the day that the Financial Times reports that with the departure of Rove and Gonzales, ”Cheney will now be unchallenged.”

Update: Since I posted the original note on this topic Wednesday night, there have been several developments. Several more well-informed people have called to discuss it — all of them with confirming information. No one called to say I was wrong.

The original cross-post that I put on DailyKos at 11:26 PM Wednesday night sank off the front page in the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole wide world was fast asleep. On Thursday, however, DailyKos diarist Scientician saw Juan Cole’s plug on Informed Comment. He checked me out on the web and determined that I was a ”respectable foreign affairs academic” (not always a compliment on DailyKos). That morning he nonetheless posted a diary that made it to the top of the recommended list, finally garnering 561 comments, many of them by people who appear not to be lunatics.

Then on Friday New Yorker contributor George Packer called. After our conversation he wrote about it on his blog Interesting Times:

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington.

His evaluation: ”True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely.”

Later he put up a postscript:

Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: “I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I’m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”

Today, the first day of Magical September (hat-tip to openthread at DailyKos), Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine picked up the story on his No Comment blog, under the title, The New Rollout. Horton summarized my post and Packer’s entry and then adds:

And no sooner does this appear in the blogosphere than we see what may be the first bit of ground-preparation for the rollout: Michael Ledeen’s new book, set for release right on schedule a week after Labor Day, and it’s called—get this–Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction. What’s the point in being subtle when you’re trying to run herd on what Nietzsche called the “bovine masses?” Here’s the blurb:

“Michael A. Ledeen has written a knowing book about Iran’s ways. His is a book that lays bare the cruelties of the radical theocracy and its ambitions beyond its borders. After Ledeen’s book, the illusions about Iran should finally be put to rest. A smart and unsentimental work.”

Ledeen, the author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, among other classics, is a fluent Italian speaker with curious connections to the Italian state security and the yellowcake uranium caper. No doubt Michael thinks that somewhere out in the ethersphere, Niccolò is smiling. I think that Niccolò was smarter than that: he’s wincing.

Somewhere in the etheral blogosphere, diarist WilyFlorentine is preparing to post a few lessons:

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him. One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

And finally:

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.