Commentary: Iran & Barbara Ann.

Byline: ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- The prestigious magazine The Economist, not MAD magazine, has a $2.2 billion B2B stealth bomber on its cover this week headlined "Next stop Iran?" In response to my question about how he rated the odds of a bombing campaign against Iran, R. James Woolsey, the former CIA director, hummed an answer for me on the sidewalk as we exited the Metropolitan Club. It was a parody of the Beach Boys hit "Barbara Ann": "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb-Bomb Iran."

Woolsey has long argued the United States has been in World War IV ever since Iran's revolutionary mullahs overthrew the shah's regime in 1979 (World War III was the Cold War, which we won). Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, al-Qaida, Europe's Islamist extremists, all are so many fronts in a World War, which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the neocons, and born again Christians, understand, but which eludes the dominant media culture and the Democratic Party (with a few exceptions, e.g. Tom Lantos, the California congressman who is the new chairman of the House International Relations Committee). At least, that's how Jim Woolsey sees the geopolitical landscape.

Bombs-Away-Over-Iran has become a hot topic in the nation's capital. "We're not going to invade Iran," President Bush assures his audiences. But why invade, when you can bomb? Some see this as a Wagnerian exit from Iraq, others as a critical battle in World War IV.

Al-Qaida has been pushed down the list of priorities. As one blogger said to the worldwide community of bloggers (now nearing the 100 million mark), "Makes you long for the good old days when our major concern was al- Qaida in Iraq under the malevolent leadership of Zarqawi (now dead)."

Now that North Korea appears to have reached a tentative deal with five other nations on initial steps toward ending its nuclear weapons program (but isn't surrendering nukes already produced), Iran emerges as the last member of President Bush's "axis of evil." Iran isn't concealing weapons of mass destruction, which Iraq's Saddam Hussein was accused of doing, but is smuggling lethal roadside devices that are killing American soldiers. IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) have morphed to EFPs (Explosively Formed Projectiles).

Overlooked in the welter of charges and counter-charges is the fact that Saddam's Iraqi army abandoned some 650,000 tons of arms, ammo and explosives when they doffed fatigues and ran home rather than fight American troops in 2003. The United States did not have enough troops to guard the hundreds of Iraqi arms depots. Much of their content wound up in the hands of militias and insurgents.