On to Iran, part xvii

AIPAC's holding its annual get together. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reports on its grand scale, quoting from promotional material:

this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."

I know I'm pretty hard on Israel in general, and maybe not the most objective observer in this case, but there's something very wrong when a significant percentage of Congress continues to flock to AIPAC while there's an ongoing espionage investigation against the lobbying group.

In any case, the major theme of the conference seems to be the threat that Iran's nuclear activity poses. Milbank describes a multimedia show, "Iran's Path to the Bomb," that ran throughout:

The exhibit, worthy of a theme park, begins with a narrator condemning the International Atomic Energy Agency for being "unwilling to conclude that Iran is developing nuclear weapons" (it had similar reservations about Iraq) and the Security Council because it "has yet to take up the issue." In a succession of rooms, visitors see flashing lights and hear rumbling sounds as Dr. Seuss-like contraptions make yellowcake uranium, reprocess plutonium, and pop out nuclear warheads like so many gallons of hummus for an AIPAC conference.

This is worrying, but by no means surprising. June's almost here and, in accord, the US is starting to show impatience with the EU-led negotiations with Iran (June is also the month Scott Ritter claims Bush has signed off for military activity).

I don't think Bush is going to be able to press hard for military action against Iran on his own, no matter the influence of the "crazies" or even if the UN starts turning the screws on Khatami. But it seems wholly plausible -- in fact, probable -- that Israel is going to do something. That's the way things have been set up for some time.

I expect that once Israel acts and Iran retaliates, the US will then get involved in some kind of military confrontation. This might even be the plan that the Sharon and Bush governments have agreed to, since it would bypass the necessity for propaganda organs to drum up a pretext that the American public, already growing weary of war in Iraq, would accept.

If you would have asked me about the potential for US military activity against Iran three years ago, I wasn't nearly as skeptical then as I am now. It would truly be an act of lunacy to try to take Iran on, considering the chaos in Iraq, which Iran would be sure to exploit via the Shi'ite bloc, and the overstretch apparent in the US military.

Unfortunately, there is every indication that a significant number of people around Bush believe that Iranians only need a little bit of encouragement to overthrow the existing government, and that a US confrontation would help tip the scales in their favor. As far as I can tell, virtually every knowledgeable observer of Iran rejects this premise, sans the Ledeenites.