ROAD TO ANOTHER WAR?

Even before President Bush warned Iran publicly on Aug. 9 of unspecified “consequences” if it continued to arm and train insurgents in Iraq, there were suspicions that he and Vice President Dick Cheney were planning and promoting war with Iran.

Mainstream news reporters now are weighing in with some hard facts about a behind-the scenes struggle within the administration over whether or not to strike Iran militarily. The dispute is said to pit the vice president against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Washington bureau of McClatchy Newspapers reported last month that Mr. Cheney had proposed launching air strikes against suspected training camps in Iran run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Secretary Rice opposed the idea, they wrote.

In the Oct. 8 New Yorker magazine, Seymour Hersh wrote that President Bush was redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. He quoted former officials and government consultants as disclosing that the White House, pushed by Mr. Cheney, had asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran. Hersh reported that the emphasis had changed from a broad bombing attack against suspected nuclear sites to “surgical” strikes against Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities said to be the source of attacks on American forces in Iraq.

Mr. Hersh wrote that President Bush told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British were “on board.” But, wrote Mr. Hersh, Secretary Rice warned to proceed carefully because of an ongoing diplomatic track. Mr. Bush was said to have merely instructed the ambassador to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

Mr. Bush thus has shifted his anti-Iran line from blocking the suspected Iranian nuclear weapons program to blaming Iran for American casualties in the Iraq war. Most authorities put Iran at least five years away from obtaining a nuclear bomb, so its uranium enrichment program could hardly be called an imminent threat and a cause for war. But a strike against Iran could be defended by the potent argument that it was to protect American soldiers in Iraq.

Some of Mr. Hersh’s sources assume that the Bush administration strategy is to provoke an Iranian outrage that would justify a military response. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a longtime Democratic security adviser, told him, “The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to overplay their hand.”

David Kay, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations, told Mr. Hersh that Iran’s limited smuggling was in response to American threats – “more a ‘shot across the bow’ sort of thing.” He was told that an American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while docked in Qatar.

With such things in the wind, we will do well to take the advice of Maine’s former Sen. William Cohen, secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, when he spoke this month in Orono. He said that only an imminent major threat can justify going to war.