An editorial from the Indian newspaper "The Telegraph" dated Monday, September 26th, goes behind the scenes in last weeks IAEA vote on Iran.
In trying to explain why India voted with the EU-3, it drops this (A)Bomb:
Top-ranking Americans have told equally top-ranking Indians in recent weeks that the US has plans to invade Iran before Bush's term ends. In 2002, a year before the US invaded Iraq, high-ranking Americans had similarly shared their definitive vision of a post-Saddam Iraq, making it clear that they would change the regime in Baghdad.
The tone is very nationalistic. I don't know this paper but the online portion of the paper seems very legitimate to me.
More from the same article:
The vote (against Iran) was unpopular in India
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally cleared the decision to vote with the US and the so-called EU-3, namely Germany, France and the UK, in favour of referring Iran at an unspecified date to the Security Council on suspicions of pursuing a programme to acquire nuclear weapons in the full knowledge that the vote would spark a furore among Left parties and to a lesser extent in the BJP.
Sigh again, has reiterated possiblity of serious violence:
On the last day of his stay in New York this month, Singh made public his fears for the safety of nearly four million Indians in the Gulf in the event of diplomacy failing to persuade Iran away from a confrontation with the US and others on the nuclear issue.
Almost all the Indians he's talking about are guest workers in UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. No sizable population of Indians currently reside in Iran. This means that Indians are expecting at least the possiblity of regional escalation after the initial US action.
The full article is here, the rest is enlightening too.
Unless this paper is pure BS or has a history of dishonesty, this editorial constitutes the first independent varification of an impending attack on Iran. The key sentence quoted is not ambiguous or diplomatic, it's the real deal.
Seems BushCo is not letting a little thing called reality bother him too much. For most of us the main question has been "can he actually do it?" But this question assumes whatever negative impacts an attack may have is actually considered negative by this Administration. This is a false assumption.
As with Iraq, BushCo and the corporate Media want us to believe that the war was at worst an "intelligent miscalculation," a sort of "right thing to do under the wrong circumstances." They want us to believe that Bush and Blair actually believed there was serious threat of WMD and ironically at the same time that the cause of democracy was worth it alone.
Well, by now, everyone here knows that's a load crap.
But what if they knew precisely how bad things would turn? What if there was a secret paper presented to Cheney's staff that predicted exactly what the casualties would be and how much this war would cost, and that US would fail in the nation building phase? What if all of this was known and BushCo still did it?
If what I just said is true, than all the reasons we now have about why an Iran invasion won't happen are invalid. Maybe they don't care that there are not enough troops. Maybe they don't care about oil prices (to end-users, that is), starting WWIII or terrorist attacks in the United States. Maybe they're not idiots as we usually like to believe but in fact evil genuises.
This is depressing....