Fear of Iran is a well-watered weed

In this latest dispatch, the US Propaganda Agency -- through its branch the Associated Press -- asks and answers the question that's on the minds of everybody's mind inside the Washington beltway establishment: How can we ratchet up the tensions with Iran to justify our upcoming military aggression?

Actually, they play it a little cooler than that. The question that is formulated in the lede of the story is excerpted below:

Dwindling Time, Rising Tension Make Iran Top Fear - ABC News: "The prospect of conflict with Iran has eclipsed Afghanistan as the key national security issue with head-spinning speed. After years of bad blood and an international impasse over Iran's disputed nuclear program, why does the threat of war seem so suddenly upon us?"

This could only fly in a country that's been rightly described as the most propagandized nation in the world. The US is awash in self-justification for what is, at heart, a purely optional war of choice against a non-threatening, non-belligerent irritant to the status quo.

Actually, the Iranians have done one thing that's extremely threatening to the US world order, but it has nothing to do with its nuclear program which, by any measure, is of no consequence when compared to those of the US and Israel. The Iranians have no bombs, but the way one hurts the world order is not militarily, but by threatening the place of the petrodollar in international finance.

That, in short, is Iran's true transgression.

Oddly enough, the move away from the dollar and into gold and other currencies is largely incentivized by Washington itself, and the economic sanctions it has imposed on dealings with Iran's banks. The Chinese and Indians, being locked out of dollar transactions for the purchase of oil, are instead turning to barter, or their own currencies. Think, law of unintended consequences, but Israeli pressure on the totally servile and craven US congress is such that the politicians fall over one another in their desire to show their humiliating subservience to the Likudnik Zionists.

The AP, in its story, goes on to explain that time is "running short to Iran to back down without a fight." This, of course, is preposterous, since it is Iran that is in the crosshairs of its bigger and more powerful adversaries, who most of all covet its strategic resources. Iran cannot back down soon enough or completely enough to forestall what has, at this point, become fait accompli in the gathering clouds of war.

Netenyahu in Israel has already played the Nazi card, and the compliant and totally captured IAEA has made a menace out of a molehill regarding Iran's nuclear activities -- none of which have amounted to a breach of the NPT, of which Iran is a signatory (but Israel, the region's only nuclear power, has not).

Still, Israel cannot stand the thought of competition, even if it's only a notional thing among career warmongers bent on regional domination.

Washington, for its part, has decided that its purposes will be best served by engaging in a hostile takeover of the main obstacle to its hegemony over desperately coveted resource wealth, and the strategic power it bestows on the dominant power.

We are in for a hell of a dust-up in 2012, and Barack Obama will be lucky to escape with his Nobel Peace Prize covering his ass as he heads for the exits in November.

The rest of us, however, are likely to be paying for this bout of geostrategic folly for the foreseeable future.

It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.