Here we go again

In the film Dr Strangelove the military was out of the control of the government. In the US it's the other way round. The US military tried to withdraw the option of a nuclear attack in its plan of aggression against Iran, but the White House refused to allow it.

That's the claim of Seymour Hersh, whose New Yorker article has caused such waves. He brought us the revelations about Abu Ghraib, so should be taken very seriously when he quotes a source saying George Bush wants Iran to be his legacy.

Well I suppose even Bush and Blair aren't stupid enough to say they want Iraq to be their legacy. But Hersh makes very frightening reading. The simple truth is that they are going to attack Iran unless we stop them. Rather depressing is the recycling of arguments which were used four years ago against Saddam Hussein.

President Ahmedinajad of Iran is, according to the US, the new Hitler. The argument goes that if Hitler had been hit by air attacks in 1935 there would never have been the Second World War or the Holocaust. Hence the public duty of waging a war on Iran.
In fact, war becomes almost an issue of health and safety.

In 1935, of course, no government would have dreamt of attacking Hitler _their royalty and politicians were beating a path to Hitler's door, impressed at his repression of trade unions and the left, ignoring his racist policies against the Jews.

But is Iran an aggressor against its neighbours and the wider world? I spent Saturday evening with Iranian friends who showed me the full page ad in the Financial Times, placed by an American Jewish organisation, showing Iran at the centre of a series of concentric circles of attack.

Incredibly the outer circle reached Britain. Iranian missiles landing on Surrey? Even the WMD dossier only claimed Saddam could hit British interests in Cyprus _ and that turned out to be a pack of lies.

Iran is in fact surrounded by nuclear powers _Israel to its west, India and Pakistan to its east, and George Bush planning a tactical nuclear strike from Washington.

But no one wants to aim sanctions or airstrikes at them. Yesterday the St Pancras coroner's court found Israeli troops had unlawfully killed Tom Hurndall, just weeks after it found they had murdered cameraman James Miller.

What's our government doing about that?