LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Iran: War
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"[I]t would a tragic error for this or any U.S. administration to encourage ethnic revolt [in Iran] because we would then alienate 95% of the pro-democracy forces in Iran." Instead, "what we need to be doing is finding a way to get all of these groups to work together rather than supporting separate wars. What’s needed is a coordinated nationwide movement. A violent revolution will only open a Pandora’s box for a future dictator.”
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The drumbeat of a possible march to war with Iran reached a new intensity in recent weeks. Although the campaign is led by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, cheerleaders in Congress and the conservative community--with no small assistance from Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his inflammatory rhetoric--are aiding and abetting.
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A few miles away, FBI agents watched as Larry Franklin, an Iran expert and career employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, drove up to the Ritz-Carlton hotel across the Potomac from Washington. A trim man of fifty-six, with a tangle of blond hair speckled gray, Franklin had left his modest home in Kearneysville, West Virginia, shortly before dawn that morning to make the eighty-mile commute to his job at the Pentagon. Since 2002, he had been working in the Office of Special Plans, a crowded warren of blue cubicles on the building's fifth floor. A secretive unit responsible for long-term planning and propaganda for the invasion of Iraq, the office's staffers referred to themselves as "the cabal." They reported to Douglas Feith, the third-most-powerful official in the Defense Department, helping to concoct the fraudulent intelligence reports that were driving America to war in Iraq.
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Iran is developing the technology that will certainly deliver nuclear energy and possibly ... a nuclear bomb. Much of the world is warning Iran that this work must stop, but it's not clear what the ultimate sanction would be.
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Over breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton, Franklin told the two lobbyists about a draft of a top-secret National Security Presidential Directive that dealt with U.S. policy on Iran. Crafted by Michael Rubin, the desk officer for Iraq and Iran in Feith's office, the document called, in essence, for regime change in Iran. In the Pentagon's view, according to one senior official there at the time, Iran was nothing but "a house of cards ready to be pushed over the precipice." So far, though, the White House had rejected the Pentagon's plan, favoring the State Department's more moderate position of diplomacy. Now, unwilling to play by the rules any longer, Franklin was taking the extraordinary—and illegal—step of passing on highly classified information to lobbyists for a foreign state. Unable to win the internal battle over Iran being waged within the administration, a member of Feith's secret unit in the Pentagon was effectively resorting to treason, recruiting AIPAC to use its enormous influence to pressure the president into adopting the draft directive and wage war against Iran.
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Christian Zionists -- Christian evangelicals who avow support of Israel based on a belief in Biblical end-times scenarios -- are whipping their followers into a fervor in favor of an attack on Iran. In a related development, conservative commentators like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have been beating the drum for a US attack on Iran, characterizing the current conflict in Lebanon as the start of “World War Three."
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