Veterans for Common Sense

IRAN has formed battalions of suicide bombers to strike at British and American targets if the nation’s nuclear sites are attacked. According to Iranian officials, 40,000 trained suicide bombers are ready for action.

The main force, named the Special Unit of Martyr Seekers in the Revolutionary Guards, was first seen last month when members marched in a military parade, dressed in olive-green uniforms with explosive packs around their waists and detonators held high.

 Dr Hassan Abbasi, head of the Centre for Doctrinal Strategic Studies in the Revolutionary Guards, said in a speech that 29 western targets had been identified: “We are ready to attack American and British sensitive points if they attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.” He added that some of them were “quite close” to the Iranian border in Iraq.

In a tape recording heard by The Sunday Times, Abbasi warned the would-be martyrs to “pay close attention to wily England” and vowed that “Britain’s demise is on our agenda”.

At a recruiting station in Tehran recently, volunteers for the force had to show their birth certificates, give proof of their address and tick a box stating whether they would prefer to attack American targets in Iraq or Israeli targets.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned last Friday that Israel was heading towards “annihilation”. He was speaking at a Tehran conference on Palestinian rights aimed at promoting Iran as a new Middle Eastern superpower.

According to western intelligence documents leaked to The Sunday Times, the Revolutionary Guards are in charge of a secret nuclear weapons programme designed to evade the scrutiny of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

One of the leaked reports, dating from February this year, confirms that President George W Bush is preparing to strike Iran. “If the problem is not resolved in some way, he intends to act before leaving office because it would be ‘unfair’ to leave the task of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities to a new president,” the document says.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a former spokesman for National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an opposition group, said a secret, parallel military programme was under way. According to sources inside Iran, the Revolutionary Guards were constructing underground sites that could be activated if Iran’s known nuclear facilities were destroyed.

The NCRI is the political wing of the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, which is deemed a terrorist organisation in Britain and America. However, much of its information is considered to be “absolutely credible” by western intelligence sources after Jafarzadeh revealed the existence of the Natanz plant in 2002.

Within the past year, 14 large and several smaller projects have been created, according to Jafarzadeh. Several are designed to be nuclear factories; others are for the storage of weapons, he claimed

This April, when Rhode Island residents file their tax returns, they’ll be able to check off a box to donate part of their tax refund to an assistance fund for the state’s National Guard and Reserve families.

Earlier this month, the governor of New Mexico signed a bill making his state the first to buy life-insurance policies – worth $250,000 – for all its active-duty Guard members. And from South Dakota to Alabama, states have introduced or passed legislation ranging from tuition assistance, to free hunting licenses, to extensions on renewal periods for driver’s licenses. Some of the perks apply to the military at large, but many are intended specifically for part-time soldiers. When you have a family their health and well being is one of your top priorities. Keeping you family safe and healthy is one of the most important things, which is one of the reasons why it is so important for people to make sure they are insured by an affordable family insurance company that offers the family the best insurance coverage for the amount that they pay. Health insurance coverage is very important for two main reasons the first reason being that it is very expensive for people to cover themselves for medical expenses without health insurance. This is because medical costs are very expensive for example just a simple X-Ray or a MRI can cost hundreds of dollars without health insurance and with insurance the costs of a X-Ray or MRI are normally much less and the person who is covered by the plan only has to pay the co-pay amount in order to get the procedure done. Visit this website to get more information regarding to family health insurance.

Imagine if the family got into a car accident and everyone had to get X-Rays, the costs of just that alone can cost a family hundreds and maybe even thousands of dollars just for that, not even to mention if something was actually wrong. If there was an injury and a family member had to stay in the hospital the costs can pile up very quickly and will force the family to make a choice, which no family member should ever have to do when it comes to health coverage and affordability. This is why there are many companies around today that are offering affordable family insurance. Across the country, experts say, state aid to military personnel is growing. It reflects the increasingly critical role of the National Guard in Iraq and the broader war on terror, and the mounting frustration with what some politicians see as Congress’s insufficient contribution to the welfare of troops.

Legislation on behalf of military personnel has flourished since 2002, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson (D) says 24 states have contacted his office about the life-insurance bill since he signed it into law Feb 2. “I believe this is spreading like wildfire because this is the right thing to do,” he says. “There is so much frustration with Congress doing so little.”

War, experts point out, strikes closer to home when entire units are called to the front from a single state. “States are kicking in because the use of the National Guard is more extensive than they are accustomed [to],” says David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. “It is their sons and daughters that are being called up.” The last major mobilization of the Guard for overseas deployments was during World War II, he says, when the draft was also in effect. “What’s different now is that in World War II everyone went…. There was no major perception of inequity.”

That perception, coupled with extended tours of duty and a mounting death toll in Iraq, have contributed to drops in recruitment numbers for the National Guard. Yet Guard and Reserve troops comprise about half of those fighting in Iraq.

Compounding their personal hardship, deployment often translates into financial strain: Forty percent of them earn less while serving abroad than in their civilian jobs, according to a Pentagon study, and experts suggest the real number of troops with a salary gap may be still higher – even without the inclusion of other costs, such as childcare when one parent is abroad.

That’s where the Rhode Island Military Relief Fund comes in, says Lt. Col. Robert Behm, director of the Rhode Island National Guard State Family Program. Contributions of $140,000 have funded grants of $1,000 for families with a loved one injured or killed on duty, and up to $2,000 for emergencies, such as avoiding evictions and paying overdue utility bills.

Yet the greatest challenge, says Colonel Behm, isn’t finding donations; rather, it’s getting families to accept them. “Our biggest problem is that most of the time, we get families who are embarrassed; they don’t want their spouse to know they couldn’t handle the situation.”

Officials expect Rhode Island residents to contribute even more money to the assistance fund come Tax Day. “There’s almost not a week that goes by that we don’t have some deployment or return,” says Lt. Gov. Charles Fogarty. “We have a state responsibility to do this.”

Other state lawmakers feel the same way, according to the NCSL:

• Missouri is one of many states trying match Rhode Island’s tax-form donation technique.

• Delaware grants veterans with 90 or more consecutive days on active duty one year of free access to state parks.

• Alabama exempts active-duty troops from hunter-safety education requirements.

State support is, of course, good public policy: States look to the National Guard to help with everything from riots to natural disasters. Now, as residents see neighbors and co-workers being deployed, there is a heightened awareness of the Guard’s sacrifices in Iraq. “The National Guard is more integrated into the civilian community, in a way that activite-duty personnel are not, says Mady Wechsler Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

In some ways, the state efforts are an extension of federal moves to boost compensation. The Pentagon recently announced plans to increase the tax-free federal death gratuity from $12,420 to $100,000 for survivors of military members killed in the line of duty.

Still, the federal government can play a larger role for National Guard and Reserve troops, says US Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana. In his state, he says, some of them have had to file for bankruptcy. That’s why he’s proposed a measure to eliminate the “patriot penalty” – the difference between civilian and combat pay.

The measure would provide a tax credit of up to $15,000 a year to companies that pay the salary difference, and would directly pay those service members whose companies do not make up the difference, up to $50,000 a year. “States have stepped forward with insurance policies” and other programs, he says. “But many states are really strapped financially.”

It’s a dilemma felt across the country. John Goheen, spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States, notes the difficulty of setting state financial priorities. “Money is not endless; hard choices need to be made,” he says. “How do you balance buying hardware with the supporting of service members and their families?”

The type of support that’s needed – and increasingly expected – has shifted since 9/11, just as the nation’s demands on its troops have changed. And with longer, more frequent deployments, many of those affected are pushing for a greater acknowledgment of how critical families – both their support of the troops and the military’s support of them – really are.

“The whole family concept is something that, during the last few years, they realize there is a need for,” says Behm.

But there is still much to do, says Amy Palmer, an Air Force veteran and the eastern region director for Operation Homefront, which provides day-to-day assistance to military families. “Because [the military] is more terrorist-oriented, it means a lot of frequent deployment,” she says. “They are not looking at the transforming of the family to meet those needs…. And it gets harder every time.”

Calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation is becoming something of an alternative national pastime. Neoconservative icon Bill Kristol, founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) of which Rumsfeld was a key member, was advocating giving Dandy Don the boot clear back in July of 2001, prior to the 9/11 attacks. Between then and now, almost everyone from the left, right and center whom the press will cover has demanded that Rummy be given the ax.

Now six retired generals have joined the chorus. A fat lot of good that’s going to do, even if Rummy actually resigns this time. Which he won’t.

Rummy deserves a lot more than getting run out of the Pentagon in a rail and feathers ceremony. He deserves a special room in the McNamara suite at the LBJ Hilton in hell. But sending him there tomorrow won’t fix the disaster he’s helped create.

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Rumsfeld deserves the bulk of the blame for mis-micromanaging the war, and he had much to do with the policy of preemptively invading Iraq. But he didn’t come up with the idea of thumping Hussein from his throne with military power all on his lonesome. Bill Kristol, one of the first neoconservatives to turn on Rummy, was a ringleader of the PNAC cabal that first publicly proposed an Iraq invasion in 1998. Other members of this flock of hawks included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Jeb Bush, and a whole cast of unsavory characters that have since infested every department in the administration.

Firing Rumsfeld as SecDef will effect about as much fundamental change in the Land of Bush as replacing Andrew Card as White House Chief of Staff did.

In its 1997 Statement of Principles, the PNAC castigated the Clinton administration, stating that, “American foreign and defense policy is adrift,” and promised, “We aim to change this.”

They changed it all right: from adrift to bow down in the water. In retrospect, foreign and defense policy wise, 1997 looks like the good old days.

The “best trained, best equipped” military in all of history has proven itself impotent in the face of an asymmetric opponent. As John Murtha and others have said, competitor countries like China and ideological enemies like al Qaeda are laughing in their sleeves as we grind national treasure into hourglass fill in Iraq (as if Iraq didn’t have enough sand in it to begin with). Nobody except England wants to play ball with us. The only guy left in England who likes us in Tony Blair, and everybody else in England seems to be getting sick and tired of him.

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Regardless of whether it does any immediate good, I’m glad to see all these retired generals speaking up, if for no other reason than forcing the Rove patrol onto the information pavement to perform its standard song-and-dance counter-attack. The more the public sees the likes of Senator George Allen (R-Virginia) try to pawn off the same old polly cracker talking points in defense of the administration, the more of the public that isn’t completely Limbaugh lobotomized will realize what a flaming bag of dog plop on America’s front porch the Bush administration and its supporters are.

And the more they realize that, the more they’ll realize the need to stomp that flaming bag out come November by smothering the GOP oxygen that feeds it.

Otherwise, the flaming bag of dog plop will burn the whole house down.

DFL congressional candidate Tim Walz gained national media attention recently when Wall Street Journal reporter David Rogers referred to Walz as “the Republican nightmare” in a piece entitled “Minnesota May be Tip of Political Iceberg.”

Walz, who has never run for elected office before has been picking up national press since last spring because of his status as a veteran of the post-9/11 era.  Walz has appeared in Atlantic Monthly magazine, The Boston Globe, Roll Call as well as on Foxnews.com and Air America Radio.  However, most recent press attention including the Wall Street Journal article focuses on the fact that Walz is not only a retired National Guard member who prior to his retirement served at the rank of Command Sgt. Major but also a well-rounded candidate who is having a great deal of success fundraising and connecting with voters.

The article goes on to contrast Walz with his opponent Congressman Gil Gutknecht:

Here in the First District, Tim Walz, the high-school teacher and coach and ringer for Speaker Hastert, has the Democratic field to himself. A retired master sergeant in the Army National Guard, he served overseas during the early war in Afghanistan. When his old artillery battalion deployed to Iraq last week, Mr. Walz’s emotions showed after traveling down to Mississippi to say goodbye.

“There were soldiers down there that I taught in school. They were my students in my classroom, I coached them,” he said. “This is not something that is a political game or a political loss.”

Mr. Walz’s opponent, Rep. Gil Gutknecht, a former auctioneer, served 12 years in the Minnesota legislature before joining Congress in 1995. He emails progress reports on Iraq to constituents but prefers to talk up immigration, where he is taking a tougher line in response the influx of illegal immigrants working in agriculture-processing facilities in the district. “It’s a hotter issue and it’s more clear-cut,” he says. Unlike Iraq, “people know which side they’re on.”

In a statement, Walz challenged Gutknecht’s refusal to discuss Iraq because it wasn’t “clear-cut” enough, saying “Iraq is a serious issue and it needs to be addressed, no matter how complex the discussion is.  If Rep. Gutknecht’s career as a politician has not adequately prepared him to deal with this issue, then he should step aside and allow those of us who are willing to tackle this issue take the lead.”

The Wall Street Journal article appeared March 30, 2006 on pg. A4.

President Bush says he declassified portions of the prewar intelligence assessment on Iraq because he “wanted people to see the truth” about Iraq’s weapons programs and to understand why he kept accusing Saddam Hussein of stockpiling weapons that turned out not to exist. This would be a noble sentiment if it actually bore any relationship to Mr. Bush’s actions in this case, or his overall record.

    Mr. Bush did not declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq – in any accepted sense of that word – when he authorized I. Lewis Libby Jr., through Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk about it with reporters. He permitted a leak of cherry-picked portions of the report. The declassification came later.

    And this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except when it suits his political purposes. He has run one of the most secretive administrations in American history, consistently withholding information and vital documents not just from the public, but also from Congress. Just the other day, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee that the names of the lawyers who reviewed Mr. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program were a state secret.

    Obviously, we do not object to government officials talking to reporters about important matters that their bosses do not want discussed. It would be impossible to cover any administration, especially one so secretive as this, unless that happened. (Judith Miller, who then worked for The Times, was one of the reporters Mr. Libby chose for this leak, although she never wrote about it.) But the version of the facts that Mr. Libby was authorized to divulge was so distorted that it seems more like disinformation than any sincere attempt to inform the public.

    This fits the pattern of Mr. Bush’s original sales pitch on the Iraq war – hyping the intelligence that bolstered his case and suppressing the intelligence that undercut it. In this case, Mr. Libby was authorized to talk about claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa and not more reliable evidence to the contrary.

    About a month before, Mr. Bush rushed to announce that American forces had found evidence of a biological weapons program in Iraq – trailers that could have been used to make doomsday devices. We now know, from a report in The Washington Post, that a Pentagon team actually on the ground in Iraq inspecting the trailers had concluded two days earlier that they were nothing of the kind.

    The White House says Mr. Bush was not aware of that report, and was relying on an assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. This is hardly the first time we’ve been told that intelligence reports contradicting administration doctrine somehow did not make it to Mr. Bush’s desk. But it does not explain why he and Mr. Cheney went on talking about the trailers for weeks, during which the State Department’s intelligence division – about the only agency that got it right about Iraq – debunked the mobile-labs theory.

    Of course, the inaccurate report saying that the trailers were bioweapons labs was made public, immediately, while the accurate one was kept secret until a reporter found out about it.

    Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it. This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.

    To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the methods used to gather it. To answer that question, they closely study the origins of the intelligence to be disclosed. Had Mr. Bush done that, he should have seen that the most credible information made it clear that the Niger story was wrong. (In any case, Iraq’s supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger happened four years before the invasion, and failed. The idea that this amounted to a current, aggressive and continuing campaign to build nuclear weapons in 2002 – as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney called it – is laughable.)

    This messy episode leaves more questions than answers, so it is imperative that two things happen soon. First, the federal prosecutor in the Libby case should release the transcripts of what Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney said when he questioned them. And the Senate Intelligence Committee must report publicly on how Mr. Bush and his team used the flawed intelligence on Iraq. Senator Pat Roberts, the committee chairman, says the panel will meet this month to discuss three of the report’s five sections. That’s a step. And it has taken only two years to get this far.

Three years ago, I was a Marine Corps captain on the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border, participating in the invasion of Iraq. Awestruck, I heard our howitzers thunder and watched artillery rockets rise into the night sky and streak toward Iraq — their light bathing the desert moonscape like giant arc welders.

As I watched the Iraq war begin, I completely trusted the Bush administration. I thought we were going to prove all of the left-wing antiwar protesters and dissenters wrong. I thought we were going to make America safer. Regrettably, I acknowledge that it was I who was wrong.

I believed the Bush administration when it said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I believed its assertion that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa and refine it into weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. I believed its claim Iraq had vast quantities of biological and chemical agents. After years of thorough inspections, all of these claims have been disproved.

I believed the administration when it claimed there was overwhelming evidence Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaida. In January 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that there was no concrete evidence linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

I believed the administration when it grandly proclaimed we were going to bring a stable, Western-style liberal democracy to Iraq, complete with religious tolerance and the rule of law. We never had enough troops in Iraq to restore civil order and the rule of law. The Iraqi elections have produced a ruling majority of Shiite fundamentalists and marginalized the seething Sunni minority. Iraq dangerously teeters on the brink of civil war. We have emboldened Iran and destabilized the entire Middle East.

I believed the administration when it claimed the war could be done quickly and cheaply. It said the war would cost only between $50 billion and $60 billion. It said that Iraqi oil revenue would fund the country’s reconstruction. I believed President Bush when he landed on the USS Lincoln and said “major combat operations have ended.”

The war has cost the American taxpayers $250 billion and counting. The vast majority — 94 percent — of the more than 2,300 United States service members killed in Iraq have occurred since Bush’s “Top Gun” proclamation. The cost in men and materiel has been far beyond what we were led to believe.

I volunteered to go back to Iraq for the fall and winter of 2004-2005. I went back out of frustration and guilt; frustration from watching Iraq unravel on the news and guilt that I wasn’t there trying to stop it. Many fine Marines from my reserve battalion felt the same and volunteered to go back. I buried my mounting suspicions and mustered enough trust and faith in my civilian leadership to go back.

I returned disillusioned by what I saw. I participated in the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. We crushed the insurgents in the city, but we only ended up scattering them throughout the province. The dumb ones stayed and died. The smart ones left town before the battle, to garner more recruits and fight another day. We were simply the little Dutch boy with our finger in the dike. In retrospect, we never had enough troops to firmly control the region; we had just enough to maintain a tenuous equilibrium.

I now know I wrongfully placed my faith and trust in a presidential administration hopelessly mired in incompetence, hubris and a lack of accountability. It planned a war based on false intelligence and unrealistic assumptions. It has strategically surrendered the condition of victory in Iraq to people who do not share our vision, values or interests. The Bush administration has proven successful at only one thing in Iraq — painting us into a corner with no feasible exit.

I will never trust any of them again.

Christopher H. Sheppard is a former Marine captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a combat engineer. He currently is finishing his master’s degree in mass communication and lives in Marysville.

 – A recently retired two-star general who just a year ago commanded a U.S. Army division in Iraq on Wednesday joined a small but growing list of former senior officers to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

“I believe we need a fresh start in the Pentagon. We need a leader who understands teamwork, a leader who knows how to build teams, a leader that does it without intimidation,” Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the Germany-based 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said in an interview on CNN.

In recent weeks, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton and Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni all spoke out against Rumsfeld. This comes as opinion polls show eroding public support for the 3-year-old war in which about 2,360 U.S. troops have died.

“You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense,” Batiste said.

“But when decisions are made without taking into account sound military recommendations, sound military decision making, sound planning, then we’re bound to make mistakes.”

Batiste, a West Point graduate who also served during the previous Gulf War, retired from the Army on November 1, 2005. While in Iraq, his division, nicknamed the Big Red One, was based in Tikrit, and it wrapped up a yearlong deployment in May 2005.

Critics have accused Rumsfeld of bullying senior military officers and disregarding their views. They often cite how Rumsfeld dismissed then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki’s opinion a month before the 2003 invasion that occupying Iraq could require “several hundred thousand troops,” not the smaller force Rumsfeld would send.

Many experts believe that the chaos that ensued and the insurgency that emerged just months later vindicated Shinseki’s view.

Batiste told CNN “we’ve got the best military in the world, hands down, period.” He did not say whether he felt the war was winnable.

‘LACK OF SACRIFICE’

“Whether we agree or not with the war in Iraq, we are where we are, and we must succeed in this endeavor. Failure is frankly not an option,” Batiste said.

Batiste said he was struck by the “lack of sacrifice and commitment on the part of the American people” to the war, with the exception of families with soldiers fighting in Iraq.

“I think that our executive and legislative branches of government have a responsibility to mobilize this country for war. They frankly have not done so. We’re mortgaging our future, our children, $8 to $9 billion a month,” he said, referring to the cost of the war.

He defined success in the war as “setting the Iraqi people up for self-reliance with their form of representative government that takes into account tribal, ethnic and religious differences that have always defined Iraqi society.”

“Iraqis, frankly, in my experience, do not understand democracy. Nor do they understand their responsibilities for a free society,” Batiste said.

Newbold, the military’s top operations officer before the Iraq war, said in a Time magazine opinion piece on Sunday that he regretted having not more openly challenged U.S. leaders who took the United States into “an unnecessary war” in Iraq. Newbold encouraged officers still in the military to voice any doubts they have about the war.

On Tuesday, Marine Corps Gen. Pete Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended Rumsfeld from the criticism.

Rumsfeld said that “there’s nothing wrong with people having opinions,” and that criticism should be expected during a war as controversial as this one.

Despite all the sloppy and inaccurate headlines about Iran “going nuclear,” the fact is that all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they “cascade.”

The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb, and since its leaders, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, say they do not want an atomic bomb because it is Islamically immoral, you have to wonder if they will ever have a bomb.

The crisis is not one of nuclear enrichment, a low-level attainment that does not necessarily lead to having a bomb. Even if Iran had a bomb, it is hard to see how they could be more dangerous than Communist China, which has lots of such bombs, and whose Walmart stores are a clever ruse to wipe out the middle class American family through funneling in cheaply made Chinese goods.

What is really going on here is a ratcheting war of rhetoric. The Iranian hard liners are down to a popularity rating in Iran of about 15{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}. They are using their challenge to the Bush administration over their perfectly legal civilian nuclear energy research program as a way of enhancing their nationalist credentials in Iran.

Likewise, Bush is trying to shore up his base, which is desperately unhappy with the Iraq situation, by rattling sabres at Iran. Bush’s poll numbers are so low, often in the mid-30s, that he must have lost part of his base to produce this result. Iran is a great deus ex machina for Bush. Rally around the flag yet again.

If this international game of chicken goes wrong, then the whole Middle East and much of Western Europe could go up in flames. The real threat here is not unconventional war, which Iran cannot fight for the foreseeable future. It is the spread of Iraq-style instability to more countries in the region.

Bush and Ahmadinejad could be working together toward the Perfect Storm.

The White House has acknowledged for the first time that a key moment in post-war Iraq, the declaration by George Bush that “we have found the weapons of mass destruction”, was based on intelligence known in Washington to be false.

The president’s assertion on May 29 2003 that Saddam Hussein’s arsenal had been located was based on the capture of two trailers claimed to be mobile biological warfare labs. In Mr Bush’s TV interview that day, and for months afterwards, US officials used them to justify the invasion.

However, the Washington Post yesterday reported that the Pentagon had sent nine US and British weapons experts to Iraq to examine the trailers, who concluded they had nothing to do with biological weapons, and transmitted their finding to Washington on May 27 2003.

In response to the paper, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, yesterday admitted Mr Bush had used false information but said he had been unaware of the fact, and called the reporting “irresponsible”. “The president’s comments were based on intelligence assessments by the CIA and briefing by the intelligence community,” he said. “It’s not something that turns round on a dime.” However, by September 2003 vice-president Dick Cheney was still saying the trailers could have been used to make anthrax.