Pushing war with Iran: ramped-up rhetoric favoring a pre-emptive strike points to a coordinated campaign by the Bush administration and neoconservative war hawks.(IRAN)

"Bush Warns of a Nuclear Armed Iran," blared the headline of an Associated Press report on the president's October 3, 2007 speech before the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Do the increasingly strident statements by the president, as well as by State Department and Pentagon officials, over the past several months signal that a U.S. military attack on Iran may be imminent? Both opponents and supporters of a military strike believe it is coming soon, based not only on official administration rhetoric and the observable preparatory movement of U.S. military assets, but also on the White House's use of private sources to build a pro-war constituency among the American public.

In recent months there has been a marked escalation of calls--by neoconservative think tanks, radio talk shows, and media organs closely allied to the Bush administration--for a massive pre-emptive U.S. military strike on Iran. Some prominent spokesmen are openly calling for the U.S. to use tactical nuclear missiles. Is this a spontaneous crescendo of popular support or a huge propaganda campaign initiated by White House spinmeisters?

On September 30, the Israeli internet news site, IsraelNationalNews.com, reported on the comments of two of the leading neoconservative war hawks, John Bolton and Norman Podhoretz. The story by Gil Ronen, entitled "Bolton, Podhoretz Say: Bomb Iranian Nuclear Plants." reports:

 
   Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told 
   Conservative Party delegates in Britain on Sunday that UN efforts 
   to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to 
   a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the 
   country. Influential conservative thinker Norman Podhoretz told a 
   British paper that he has advised U.S. President George W. Bush to 
   do just that. 

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AS THE NEW AMERICAN reported in its April 2 cover story, "'Engineering War," the Bush administration has been strongly signaling for months that it is preparing militarily for a massive attack on Iran. It also has been trying to prepare the public psyche to accept this aggression as a course of action that is unavoidable: there is, supposedly, no other alternative.

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