One More Manufactured Crisis for the Road (to Armageddon)

Juan Cole reproduces in toto an important essay by William O. Beeman, of Brown University, who details how the Iran nuclear crisis is no such thing. But this thing is begining to spin out of control. If Congress does not get its head out of its ass, we'll be hearing jets over Tehran sometime around the end of March, as the Israelis have threatened. ...

At the end of his essay, Beeman writes:

The mantra "Iran must not get nuclear weapons" has been repeated so often now that most people have come to believe that Iran has them or is getting them. Has anyone stopped to think that this only became an issue when the neoconservative agenda to "remake" the Middle East--including Iran-became actualized? The Iran nuclear crisis is truly a manufactured crisis, based on the flimsiest of evidence and reasoning. I can only hope that soberer minds rethink this position. [my emphasis]

The tragedy would be that in the end, the U.S. may goad Iran in to a real nuclear weapons program. The Iranians may reason that since they are being punished for the crime anyway, they might as well commit it. '