But it was all just a media frenzy. The same war scare has erupted every few years for the last two decades, largely based on the London press, which repeatedly expects Iran to be blown to smithereens by the Americans in a short while.
The foundation for many of these stories in the past has been the discovery that the number of US aircraft carriers off Iran has been doubled from one to two. London reporters then say this means the Americans are about to attack.
Actually, there are two US aircraft carriers off Iran every six months. A carrier is on duty there for six months. A replacement carrier is sent out and the two carriers overlap anywhere from a couple of day to two weeks. But despite about a dozen news reports over the years of this shocking double carrier deployment, there has been no attack on Iran.
This past week, the frenzy had nothing to do with carriers, however.
The main war report appeared last Wednesday in the Israeli daily Haaretz, which said Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the leaders of two of Israel’s main parties, had jointly decided that it was time now to attack and were trying to line up other members of the war cabinet.
Barak laughed at that news report, calling it “delusional.” He said flatly that Israel “has not yet decided to embark on any operation.”
The second newspaper report appeared the same day in London, where The Guardian, without citing any source, said Britain’s Defense Ministry believed the United States might accelerate plans for missile strikes on key Iranian sites and said Washington would seek and receive British military help for the mission.
These reports were taken uncritically by many and led to website and blogger reports of imminent war.
In Iran, 121 writers, journalists and intellectuals together issued a public plea for the attackers to think again, saying, Humanitarian assistance and democracy cannot be delivered through the end of a cannon.”
The US did not seem to take The Guardian report seriously and made its standard statement that the Obama Administration does not take any option off the table. But spokeswoman Victoria Nuland added, “We have said many times in the last weeks and months that we do not seek a military confrontation with Iran.” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had said the same thing just days before.
While much of the Western media was chasing the war on Iran, a Kuwaiti daily was going in the opposite direction. Al-Watan reported last Wednesday—the same day as The Guardian and Haaretz reports—that the US Fifth Fleet was quietly sailing away from its base on Bahrain “to open the way for Iran to invade, occupy and attack our sister Bahrain, and allow saboteurs to take control of the regime.”
The author, Ahmad Muham-mad al-Fahd, explained that this was a repeat of the American ploy with Iraq. When Washington decided to do away with Iraq, it paved the way for it to invade Kuwait and then turned on it and crushed it. Fahd said Washington was now adopting the same ploy to crush Iran by first luring into in Bahrain.