From Rolling Stone: "Iran, the Next War

James Bamford offers us a long but worthy piece in the new Rolling Stone about what I'm sure the neocons and the desperate-for-votes-in-November's-midterm-elections GOP will make into our next inevitable war.

As you may recall, well before we entered Iraq, there were far more than bumblings between neo-cons like John Bolton, James Woolsey, William Kristol, and Kenneth Perle that we had to engage Iran. At the same time, powers in Israel were arguing strongly that the U.S. should lead a US/Israeli invasion into Iraq.

Will they get their wish? Is that why Israel suddenly decided to use two soldiers' capture as an excuse to go into Lebanon. I'm not sure, but I think it is possible.

Here's a snippet from Bamford in Rolling Stone:

... the Bush administration's hostility toward Iran is not simply an outgrowth of the current crisis. War with Iran has been in the works for the past five years, shaped in almost complete secrecy by a small group of senior Pentagon officials attached to the Office of Special Plans. The man who created the OSP was Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. A former Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the Reagan administration, Feith had long urged Israel to secure its borders in the Middle East by attacking Iraq and Iran. After Bush's election, Feith went to work to make that vision a reality, putting together a team of neoconservative hawks determined to drive the U.S. to attack Tehran. Before Bush had been in office a year, Feith's team had arranged a covert meeting in Rome with a group of Iranians to discuss their clandestine help.

The meeting was arranged by Michael Ledeen, a member of the cabal brought aboard by Feith because of his connections in Iran. Described by The Jerusalem Post as "Washington's neoconservative guru," Ledeen grew up in California during the 1940s. His father designed the air-conditioning system for Walt Disney Studios, and Ledeen spent much of his early life surrounded by a world of fantasy. "All through my childhood we were an adjunct of the Disney universe," he once recalled. "According to family legend, my mother was the model for Snow White, and we have a picture of her that does indeed look just like the movie character."