Iran Invasion?

The liberal blogs are abuzz with rumors that Bush has already signed orders to attack Iran in June. This started with former weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Ritter hates Bush. Prior to the invasion of Iraq he insisted that Iraq did not have any WMDs (he was right) and that we did not have the forces need to invade Iraq (he was wrong). He has been writing columns criticizing Bush ever since. His most recent pronouncements are:

Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia’s Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.

Before you get upset about this, let's have a breath of sanity. In this case it comes from an unlikely source - Eric Alterman's column on MSNBC. Alterman went on tour without a power cord to his laptop so a guest blogger is filling in. This blogger, Siva Vaidhyanathan, seems to have all of his marbles and possibly some that Alterman lost.

Among other points, Vaidhyanathan points out that Ritter has burned his bridges with the Bush administration. Although the radical blogs assume that he has inside knowledge, he is probably just selectively quoting Seymour Hersh.

He gives other reasons that we are unlikely to get into a war with Iran:

1. No soldiers left.
2. No money left.
3. The Pentagon does not see any way to take that country (and its nuclear facilities are spread out and defended) and understands that Iran has many ways to strike back in places like Beruit, Tel Aviv, and all of Iraq.

There's lots more. Read it before Alterman finds out.

What about the Iraq election?

Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

Proof to be given later by a third party? I'll believe it later when I hear the proof.