War with Iran Cheat Sheet
Knowledgable people are saying Bush will attack Iran as a grand parting shot. The justification and/or provocation will be total bullshit. Nevertheless, the Democrats and the media will buy it. Facts to keep in mind:

* Iran’s faith-based regime, which intones death to America and Israel on a daily basis, has yet to attack another country after 30 years in power.

* In fact, Iran, nee Persia, has not attacked another country in 270 years.

* The U.S. has already attacked Iran twice. In 1953, a CIA coup overthrew the democratically-elected government and installed a brutal dictatorship. American companies, with the Brits as junior partners, took over Iran’s oil. The dictatorship and the oil companies were kicked out by the current regime in 1978. Washington armed and advised its then ally Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iraq, providing components for the chemical weapons that Hussein used against the Iranians and his own people. The U.S. eventually sold weapons to both sides. A million Iranians and Iraqis died in the eight year war.

* The war will be about oil and dominance. The U.S. regards the Persian Gulf as it does the Long Island Sound. In particular, Washington and Wall Street do not accept that the people who live there have a right to their own oil. "Iran has legitimate aspirations that need to be respected," Henry Kissinger recently wrote in the Washington Post, “but those legitimate aspirations do not include control over the oil that the United States and other industrial countries need.”

* Iran is three times bigger than Iraq in area and population. It has a very large army equipped with modern weapons, including thousands of medium and short range missiles. So it can mount at least three times the war we now have in Iraq.

* Then again, the Iranians might respond minimally and allow the ensuing rocketing of oil prices, plunge into global depression, explosion of anger in the Islamic world, upshot in terrorism, and isolation of the U.S. by a disgusted world punish America instead.

* Seventy percent of the people in the region, including most Iranians, are Shiites. Iran supports various Shiite movements, some of them armed, throughout the Middle East. By the same token, Saudi Arabia supports armed Sunni movements, including those making the great majority of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. The U.S. and Israel support Christian, Sunni and Shiite clients in the region, and also bankroll and advise various armed factions inside Iran that carry out terrorist attacks to destabilize the country.

* Iran denies it wants or is building nuclear weapons. An official US intelligence community report as of January 2008 and continuing reports by the UN’s nuclear inspection agency confirm Iraq’s denial.

* Any use of nuclear weapons against Iran or any other Muslim country by either the U.S. or Israel will guarantee that sooner or later a nuclear weapon will be used against Israel.

* The chances of Bush attacking Iran between now and January 20, 2009: seventy percent on the Peter Meter.