For several years now we've been hearing about the Bush administration's plans for war with Iran. Two wars were not enough. They wanted war with Iran. The problem with war with Iran was the the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not going well, and where exactly were Bush & Co. going to find the soldiers and the money for a third war?

There was another problem with war in Iran. The country did not attack us, and most Americans are quite wary of pre-emptive war, particularly since that strategy got us into the quicksand in Iraq. Apparently, the Bush administration was thinking about staging an incident that would give the U.S. an excuse for war in Iran. According to ThinkProgress.org:

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

If Seymour Hersh says it, then I believe it. Hersh has exposed many a national security scam over the years, and helped in his own way to end the Vietnam War in covering serious atrocities that American soldiers inflicted against innocent Vietnamese peasants. Someone from ThinkProgress.org asked Hersh for details about the plans to provoke war in Iran:

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

. . .

“Look, is it high school? Yeah,” Hersh said. “Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.”

For those of us paying attention to the political shenanigans surrounding the Iraq war, recall that Bush and Cheney were thinking about provoking a reaction from Saddam Hussein so that the U.S. could start war with Iraq. I am not the only one who remembered this. A writer for the Washington Monthly recalls that aborted plan:

If this story sounds familiar, that's because it is. In one of David Manning's famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

War for the hell of it is no way to conduct foreign policy. Not only is it illegal and totally immoral, but it's our brothers and sisters who would die in that war. Not to mention many, many innocent Iranians. Tom Tommorow sums it all up: "[The plan to provoke Iran] would fool Americans into supporting a war with Iran, you see. In non-insane countries, this would merit screaming headlines and congressional investigations, all leading to mass resignations if it turned out to be true. In America, it merits a few blog posts>