Encouraging the willful, foreign creation of a humanitarian crisis upon a nation of 74 million human beings as collective punishment is not only appalling, its prescription is criminal under international law.

The simple fact is that the president of the United States, Barack Obama, and his top generals and cabinet officers, are committing a war crime every time they threaten Iran with attack.

You can only convince yourself that it is morally legitimate to bomb other people when you have dehumanised them or reduced them to caricatures of evil. The enemy.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat its errors and Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, far from treating Iran and Syria as different from Iraq, exactly repeats the pro-war arguments from the Iraq era.

An attack on Iran would be an act of criminal stupidity, says Seumas Milne, but US and Israeli leaders are talking themselves into a disastrous conflict.

As with Iraq in 2003, the sense that war against Iran is inevitable and unstoppable is being energetically encouraged by political hardliners and their media accomplices.

Iran has Weapons of Mass Destruction! What's become of western leaders, that they display such a shocking lack of imagination and can't think up new stories to justify a military attack on Iran but just re-use the old one?

The present policy is to refuse to rule out the use of force. Such a policy is not only naïve but illogical, says Conservative MP John Baron. We are keeping an option alive which all know would be a disaster.

The war with Iran has not yet taken place. And that means we still have a chance to prevent it, but for that to happen, the public needs to wake up from its trance – and it needs to do it soon.

American political officials and commentators feel free to insist, with a straight face, that Iran is an aggressor nation posing such a serious threat to the U.S. that war may be necessary to stop it.

This time the target is Iran, the pretence the regime's imminent possession of nuclear weapons. But some things will remain the same – it will lead to slaughter and end in disaster.

There's no doubting the Israeli appetite for war with Iran, but the US is urging them not to attack unilaterally, hoping that punitive sanctions will satisfy Israel for now.

Obama's anti-negotiating stance has made an escalating sanctions regime the only available course short of war, one that is likely to lead to war -- unintended or otherwise -- says a former Obama advisor.

Like Iraq, sanctions are likely to intensify the crisis, impoverish ordinary Iranians and psychologically prepare the ground for war because of the demonisation of Iran.

The generation that opposed the Afghan and Iraq wars in their millions is not going to stand for yet another conflict to waste resources, destroy lives and make the world an even more dangerous place.

There is no more evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons than there was for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction but that hasn't stopped the media stoking the flames of war.