Iran Attack Warning: Update April 9:
It looks like an attack on Iran, if indeed it was in the works for early april, has been averted or at least delayed. Nevertheless, the US continues to try and provoke a fight, but Iran is not biting. A third aircraft carrier group is presently arriving in the area.
more on Iran, including recent postings and the original 3/27 report:
According to Russian military sources, a sneak attack on Iran is now set to start at 4 am on April 6. Use of bunker-buster tactical nukes "could not be excluded". (story-Eng) (story- Fr.)
"Observers comment that this dispatch represents a high-level orchestrated leak from the Kremlin, in effect a war warning, which draws on the formidable resources of the Russian intelligence services, and which deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness by pro-peace forces around the world.
Asked by RIA-Novosti to comment on the Uglanov report, retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov confirmed its essential features in a March 21 interview: "I have no doubt that there will be an operation, or more precisely a violent action against Iran." Ivashov, who has reportedly served at various times as an informal advisor to Putin, is currently the Vice President of the Moscow Academy for Geopolitical Sciences.
Ivashov attributed decisive importance to the decision of the Democratic leadership of the US House of Representatives to remove language from the just-passed Iraq supplemental military appropriations bill which would have demanded that Bush come to Congress before launching an attack on Iran. Ivashov pointed out that the language was eliminated under pressure from AIPAC, the lobbing group representing the Israeli extreme right, and of Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni.
"We have drawn the unmistakable conclusion that this operation will take place," said Ivashov. In his opinion, the US planning does not include a land operation: "Most probably there will be no ground attack, but rather massive air attacks with the goal of annihilating Iran's capacity for military resistance, the centers of administration, the key economic assets, and quite possibly the Iranian political leadership, or at least part of it." full story- (Eng) (Fr.)
Note the mention of AIPAC. Two of AIPAC's top officials (Steve Rosen, who for 20 years was the chief AIPAC lobbyist, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's top foreign policy analyst) are currently under indictment for espionage against the United States; their contact, Larry Franklin, who worked under Feith and Wolfowitz in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, has been sentenced to 12 years for his involvement.

UAE off Limits for Iran Strike
Khalifa bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, said Tuesday his country will not allow anyone to use its territory to conduct anti-Iranian operations.(ref) Qatar, home to 6,500 US troops and the enormous al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters of the Pentagon's Central Command, said earlier it also would not allow an attack from it's territory. (The Gulf Cooperation Council, consisting of Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the Emirates, has called on all its members not to support any US action against Iran) (ref)
3/27: Biggest US forces exercise since 2003 begins today in the Gulf.
A third carrier group, the USS Nimitz, leaving for Persian Gulf April 2, joining the Stennis and Eisenhower groups. American in Bahrain advised by Central Command officers to "pack up and leave". (ref)

Spreading the War to Iran?
Israel has obtained permission to flyover Gulf Arab states and Iraq (the latter from the US command) on bombing runs to Iran. The US is asking for the same from Turkey. Hear the latest in a Democracy Now interview with Seymour Hersh on his recent article "The Redirection".
We've learned the Iranians made a proposal for a comprehensive agreement with the US back in 2003, which was deep-sixed with prejudice by Cheney; Rice claims she never saw it. (read the proposal here)

Same Old... LA Times reports:
"Although international concern is growing about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran.
The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic was developing illicit weapons.
"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out." -LA Times

Commanders to Resign if War on Iran
The Sunday Times reports:
"Some of America's most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack. 'There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,"a source with close ties to British intelligence said. "There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.'"

All Twisted Up in War
Bush-Cheney have finally realized what we in these pages and many others have been saying since before the Iraqi invasion... that Iran would be the chief geopolitical beneficiary of destroying Saddam's regime. Now that it's happened, Bush-Cheney have fashioned a 'redirection' in American focus, which is to say, a new enemy- Shiite Iran. Never mind that it was Sunni Al Qaeda who supposedly started this Long War on 911. Never mind that it's the Sunni resistance which has fought the US most bitterly there, or that the Shiia run the government which Bush-Cheney created there for Iraqis, and are our allies in pacifying the country.
First it was a 'pack of lies', and the country foolishly went along. Saddam was developing nukes, he was in league with AlQueda, and was therefore an imminent danger to the US. It wasn't just that these assertions were exposed as lies. Bush-Cheney's actions actually have ended up giving a degree of reality to these once fictional fears. Iran learned that if you have the nuke, you won't be attacked, so best to get one asap; and with Saddam and the secular Baathists gone, the Sunni areas of Iraq are now rife with Al Qaeda. So a new fiction sprang up- framed by the assertion that while Bush-Cheney may have 'been wrong' [actually, they lied] about the need to attack Iraq, they were trying to do the right thing. The new fiction would be the pipe-dream floated for years by the PNAC, that overthrowing Saddam and installing a democracy there would lead to wholesale positive changes throughout the Middle East, making for new allies and opportunities for bases and controlling influence.
Thus came the short-lived purple-finger era, which delivered Iraq to the Islamist Shiia, and Palestine to Hamas, and Lebanon to Hezbollah, and following which Iraq exploded in uncontrollable violence. ("When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos. I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam." -Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence agency) Now having partially woken up to the blunder, Bush-Cheney are floating yet a new purpose for their disastrous military adventure in Mesopotamia, that being to curb and contain the Shiia crescent, to wit, joining with the Sunni governments in the region (financiers of Al Queda) to undo the gift Bush delivered to Shiia Iran. Bush-Cheney are even secretly financing Sunni jihadi groups linked to Al Qaeda and 911! This is called "redirection" in the White House.
So in terms of justifying this bloody trillion-dollar boondoggle, we went from outright lies, to a delusional fantasy, to now discovering (in reality creating) a new enemy in theater. One might at least wish to see in this progression an indication of an increasingly reality-based understanding of the Middle East on the part of Bush and his neo-cons. Unfortunately however, the Bush-Cheney response to this new problem on the ground is the same: war. And war on Iran is not a reality-based option, but a long-term holdover goal of the PNAC vision.
see Seymour Hersh, "Redirection" New Yorker Magazine
PNAC- Project for a New American Century

March: WAR ALERT: Bush & Cheney Appear Determined to Attack Iran
The administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs, Hillary Mann, said: "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for."
Zbigniew Brzezinski warns the Senate: "A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. ...
"A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." -Zbigniew Brzezinski Feb 1, 2007. Senate Comm. Foreign Relations (pdf).
This comes as the Guardian newspaper reports US preparations for an air strike against Iran have reached an advanced stage. The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring.
The latest salvo in the scenario: courtesy of NYTimes' Michael Gordon, of Iraq-WMD-lies fame, quoting high "unnamed" sources: Iran is giving advanced IEDs to the Shiia in Iraq. Never mind that it's Sunnis who are using IEDs to blow up our convoys. Never mind that the Shiias run the government we set up, and are not yet fighting us. Go tell Alice...
Experts and ex-officials have warned them of a disaster. Senators warned them of a "constitutional crisis" if they do it. Allies have warned them not to do it. Generals have warned them not to do it.
But it seems the plan moves ahead, no matter that this time, Mr Bush, the self-proclaimed "Educator in Chief", is not doing so well with his part of the job- selling the war in advance to a gullible press and public- (as in "catapult the propaganda"). Each day brings denials of warlike intentions, but also new 'evidence' of Iranian arms transfers; the pressure ratchets up inexorably, the plan is in motion, if even poorly sold. Can it be stopped?
Preparations continue for an air assault. Newsweek is also reporting that the U.S. is likely to send a third Navy carrier to the Persian Gulf. Since Bush-Cheney sold nuclear tipped bunker busters to Israel recently, we can assume the Israelis will participate.
And yet key democratic candidates, Clinton and Edwards, who have already come out against the Iraq War, still pander to AIPAC and the AEI with earnest assurances that, when it come to Iran, 'everything is on the table' and that Iran 'cannot be permitted to develop nuclear weapons'; thus maneuvering themselves into position for a sucker punch when sometime in the next months there's an 'incident', a riposte, and bingo, we're bombing, for all the reasons these Dems endorsed. They'll get their war, and the suckered Dems will be neutered in the presidential campaign. 'I supported the War in Iraq, until they botched it, then I was against it; I supported the War in Iran, until they launched it, now I oppose it...' Good luck!

Who has something intelligent to say about Iran? Try Wesley Clark: "Is War with Iran Inevitable?"
Prof. Juan Cole follows the details at Informed Comment
Craig Unger in Vanity Fair:"From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq"
Guardian: "Target Iran: US able to strike in the spring"