There’s been a steady trickle of news over the past few months related to a possible American attack on Iran, with no one story standing out over the generally ominous hum. After reaching a fevered pitch in Spring the U.S. administration’s anti-Iranian rhetoric died down a little after the incident with the captured British troops but it’s been slowly building up again over the Summer, with Bush’s heart and “mind” now pretty much won by Cheney’s needling.

Meanwhile, outside the White House, American pressure for an attack never went away, with the mainstream presidential hopefuls trying to outdo each other in making Dubya look like a long-haired peacenik Jessie. Clinton foams at the mouth about not limiting the options on some kind of table, McCain rewrites imperial jingoism into innocent Beach Boys songs, but the foul biscuit of war goes to Obama who, not satisfied with Iran, wants to kick off a nuclear war with Pakistan too. What a prick. The mainstream media, meanwhile, seem to be satisfied with repeating their 2003 propaganda with all the ‘q’s tippexed out and replaced with ‘n’s.

In short, the possibility of war is very real – or at least, so concludes a recent study by leading British academics published in Raw Story -and very terrifying:

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order…

• Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on [suspected] WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact.
• US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.
• US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice.

I can’t be bothered going over the case against war in detail because, surely, we’re all convinced now that any attack would be unjustifiable, unnecessary, illegal, and catastrophic almost beyond words. (If you’re not convinced, CASMII have put together a decent factsheet that you should really check out before leaving bitchy comments).  No, the real question is how can we stop this?

The report suggests that the U.S. is likely to be alone in any such endeavor, save for Israel and maybe the U.K.  Though the anemic American antiwar movement needs to get its stuff together sharpish, and we should give a thought for Israel’s courageous refuseniks, it is surely those of us in the maybe state have the most to play for.

Gordon Brown knows by now how much we all hate asking the Americans how high they want us to jump, but his cooling off of the special relationship so shamelessly exaggerated in the press seems to have no more substance than that he wears a suit, and not jeans, to Camp David.  If public pressure lets up he may well be tempted to join the war, and he is likely to get it through Parliament with little trouble – and it seems almost certain that airbases on British soil (not to mention Diego Garcia) will play a role.

Nevertheless, his recent posturing shows that Brown is wary of the public, unsure of how much more we can tolerate.  Somehow – by protests, by writing letters to MPs, by threatening a general strike if need be – we need to settle that doubt.  Enough is enough, we will not attack Iran, we will not support an attack on Iran, we will not allow Iran to be attacked from our soil.  That’s all there is to it.

(h/t RickB and frolix22 for links)