Interlude

I'm going to be abroad until the last week of September, so its very unlikely that I'll post anything til then. If you want to contact me it might be better to wait until I get back. The Diary's email address gets a lot of spam and genuine emails seem to get mixed in amongst all that in the Bulk folder. I might not have time to fish your message out of there before its lost forever, so if it can wait please get in touch after 24th.

As ever, I highly recommend, Juan Cole's Informed Comment for a daily briefing and expert analysis on all things Middle East, Paul Woodward's War In Context for a daily round-up of global news stories relating to the "war on terror", and Tony Karon and Tom Englehardt for some of the best written and most thoughtful analysis around. For UK-specific stuff, it doesn't get any better than UKWatch, and a sharp and informed blog by the tenacious young Jamie Stern-Weiner is definitely one to watch.

One more thing, it appears that US Vice President Dick Cheney has issued "instructions" to friendly media, think tanks and general opinion formers to commence in earnest the propaganda campaign for massive airstrikes on Iran, as of this month. This will mirror the now-legendary campaign of deception - which also commenced at the start of the political season, September 2002 - that led to the invasion of Iraq.

Our task is not just to counter this propaganda campaign but also to ensure that the propagandists are not allowed to frame the debate as they were last time. Last time the equation placed in people's minds was "Iraqi WMD equals war", irrespective of the plain fact that a crippled, impoverished Saddam posed no threat to international security with or without WMD. This time it'll be "Iranian nuclear power equals nuclear holocaust" and "Iranian involvement in Iraq equals casus belli for massive air strikes". Simple points need to be remembered when countering this:

• Iran will never launch an aggressive war to "wipe Israel off the map" when Israel has 200plus nuclear weapons, its sugar daddy the US has enough to obliterate the planet, and Iran has nothing, or next to nothing. Iran is not going to commit suicide. In any case, Ahmadinejad, never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map". He never said it. Its a bit of hysteria that's been got up out of thin air. Thousands of Iranians should not be slaughtered over a translation error - one which has already been corrected for the benefit of anyone interested in the truth.
• There is no prospect of Iran "dominating" the Middle East. Iran is not a security threat. It is (a) militarily weak and (b) has to live in that region and so needs it stable. The biggest security threat in the region is the US and Israel, the two sides with both WMD and the worst recent history of aggression.

For more on this see my recent, "Still Time for War With Iran" which cautions that the prospect of a war should not be written off lightly, "The Iranian Hostage Crisis in Context" which describes the strategic issues from the Iranian perspective, and my interview on Resonance FM's Middle East Panorama, where I talked about that a little more.

That's all. Back in a few weeks, when you'll see a review of Britain's occupation of southern Iraq.