Go read Bill­mon, please. I wish I were this smart:

And so the most promis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for a ratio­nal set­tle­ment have all passed us by. Instead of a mod­er­ate reform pres­i­dent and a group of ner­vous aya­tol­lahs anx­ious to cut a deal, Amer­ica now has Ahmadine­jad — and the dawn of what could con­ceiv­ably become an explic­itly fas­cist regime in Iran, or at least a very close sub­sti­tute for one.
The good news, such as it is, is that Ahmadinejad’s end-times ide­ol­ogy doesn’t seem to include any grand ter­ri­to­r­ial ambi­tions: no “Greater Iran” (Iran is already a greater Iran), no leben­sraum in the east. We also have time — time to see how things shake out, to see if the aya­tol­lahs can ham­string their trou­ble­some pro­tege, to see if the democ­racy move­ment can make a polit­i­cal come­back. Time for Ahmadine­jad to lose some of his pop­u­lar shine as Iran’s inter­nal prob­lems worsen. Time for our own hard­line war­mon­gers to be booted out of power.
But unfor­tu­nately, our divinely ordained pres­i­dent may not be pre­pared to wait (and the last sen­tence of the pre­ced­ing para­graph appears to be one of the rea­sons.) Which means at this point we prob­a­bly should be wor­ry­ing less about what hap­pened in Munich in 1938, and more about what hap­pened there in 1972, when the Ger­man police moved in and tried to dis­arm the ter­ror­ists.
Mul­ti­ply that car­nage by a thou­sand, or a mil­lion, and you’ve got more than a polit­i­cal slo­gan; you’ve got a war.

Shot…

MATTHEWS: Where is the heart of the zealotry here? Do you have a name of a per­son who is really say­ing, we will do any­thing it takes to stop Iran from devel­op­ing a nuclear weapon?

HERSH: The one that’s on the record is George Bush, and so is Mr. Cheney. Bush has said repeat­edly, again, peo­ple talk to me and they use the word mes­sianic. He has had two red lines that the Ira­ni­ans can­not cross. _One is Iran is plan­ning to run a small pilot pro­gram for enrich­ing ura­nium, prob­a­bly in the next month or two, maybe six week. If they do that, that’s it for Bush. That’s a line they can’t cross._

*Chris Matthews and Sey­mour Hersh on “Hard­ball,” April 10, 2006*

… and chaser.

TEHRAN — Iran announced Tues­day that its nuclear engi­neers had advanced to a new phase in the enrich­ment of ura­nium, and Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad and a series of the country’s rul­ing cler­ics declared that the nation would now speed ahead, in defi­ance of a United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil warn­ing, to pro­duce nuclear fuel on an indus­trial scale.
Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad, in a speech that was broad­cast live from the city of Mashad, said Iran is deter­mined to develop pro­duc­tion on an indus­trial scale.
“Iran has joined the nuclear coun­tries of the world,” Mr. Ahmadine­jad said dur­ing a large, care­fully staged and nation­ally tele­vised cel­e­bra­tion in Mash­had, which included video pre­sen­ta­tions of each step of the nuclear process that he declared Iran had mas­tered. “The nuclear fuel cycle at the lab­o­ra­tory level has been com­pleted, and ura­nium with the desired enrich­ment for nuclear power plants was achieved.“

“Iran Reports Big Advance in Enrich­ment of Uranium”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/12/world/middleeast/12iran.html?hp&ex=1144900800&en=b9ad13587321bba1&ei=5094&partner=homepage
New York Times, April 11, 2006

Oh, Pres­i­dent Bush, you ras­cal. You do so like to repeat your­self. Now that Iran is, unsur­pris­ingly, num­ber one — with a bullet! — on the “Coun­tries We Don’t Like” list, the ques­tion in the White House is, what to do about it?
Why, “bomb the snot out of them, of course.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040801082.html I don’t think I need to go into why this is a hor­ri­ble, no-good, very bad idea, but appar­ently, “Bush views Tehran as a seri­ous men­ace that must be dealt with before his pres­i­dency ends, aides said, and the White House, in its new “National Secu­rity Strategy”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf, last month labeled Iran the most seri­ous chal­lenge to the United States posed by any coun­try.” (Page 20)
Sy Hersh also “weighs in”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact with a ter­ri­fy­ing arti­cle full of extra details. High­lights: nukes are desired option, there’s a wide­spread belief in the Admin­is­tra­tion that Ahmadine­jad is bonkers and that Hezbol­lah will not sit idly by should Iran be attacked. Hezbol­lah spokesman Hos­sein Nabulsi told me late last year that the group is a reli­gious party and it belongs to Supreme Leader Khameini in Tehran. “‘Inter­ests’ does not begin to describe the depths of the links between us,” he said.
Now, the U.S. makes all sorts of plans. I’m sure there plans to nuke Canada or France moul­der­ing away some­where in the bow­els of the Pen­ta­gon. That doesn’t mean they’ll ever be dusted off and imple­mented. So the real ques­tion is not “Are we mak­ing plans to nuke Iran?” but “How likely is it that we will imple­ment plans to nuke Iran?” A friend of mine who fol­lows this stuff closely told me that he doesn’t think Bush has the polit­i­cal cap­i­tal or time to pull off an attack. As he says, the worst-case/most-likely sce­nario is that this is a real Bush plan that will never see the light of day after Cheney has lit­tle fan­tasies in the VP bath­room over it. Neo-con porn, in other words. The best-case/least-likely sce­nario is that this is a feint to con­vince the Israelis we mean busi­ness so they will keep their planes on the ground. Or, alter­nately, Hersh could be dead-wrong about the whole thing. Maybe he’s just doing that thing he does of dan­gling sexy rumors with enough meat on them to make them inter­est­ing and then see­ing what bub­bles up to the sur­face after he’s turned up the heat. It’s a good repor­to­r­ial strat­egy to shake things up.
Or it might all be dis­in­for­ma­tion from the U.S. to get the Ira­ni­ans to the table. Of course, there’s no rea­son the buzz can’t be all of these things and, frankly, that’s pretty likely.
At any rate, things are about to get a lot more inter­est­ing in the region. I well remem­ber the July 2002 1A story in the NYT out­lin­ing the Bush plans to invade Iraq. (4^th ID from Turkey! Oops.) As many oth­ers have noted, the whole Iran­ian sce­nario of WMD, regime change, etc., is stun­ningly sim­i­lar to the run-up to the Iraq war.
So if Bush can repeat him­self, why not me? I’m in Beirut now for a while, as TIME Mag­a­zine and I have decided to start see­ing other peo­ple. But we’re still friends, and my part­ing with TIME was most ami­ca­ble. I’ve not worked with a bet­ter orga­ni­za­tion and I’m happy to still be asso­ci­ated with them, if only on a part-time basis. But I’m now more aggres­sively free­lance. While the URL of this site will prob­a­bly remain back​-to​-iraq​.com, the focus of the report­ing is going to broaden to include all of south­west Asia: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond. So I’m going to open my dona­tions jar back up and start accept­ing dona­tions again to fund a report­ing trip to Iran. (See the but­ton in the side­bar?)
So, if any­one wants to sug­gest a re-branding cam­paign, I’m all ears. But for now, I’m going to con­cen­trate on new report­ing in Lebanon, and work on get­ting my ass to Tehran in the com­ing months. If any­one has advice on visas, fix­ers, peo­ple to con­tact, groups to con­nect with, please send them along to chris (at) back (hyphen) to (hyphen) iraq (dot) com. Thank you.