he Pentagon plays war games with Iran

[lovuian]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IC02Ak07.html
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The description of Pentagon thinking suggests a strategy that is much more aggressive than the line represented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's announcement on Tuesday that the United States would participate in direct talks with Iran in the context of a conference to be convened by the Iraqi government.

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The participant's account of the Pentagon meeting did not indicate any timetable for the sequence of steps or what the climactic move in the campaign would be. Nor did it suggest that a decision had been made by the White House to launch air strikes against Iran. However, the moves now planned would increase the likelihood of war in the event that Washington's escalatory moves fail to sway Iran's leaders.

A former assistant secretary of defense in the administration of US president Bill Clinton, Charles Freeman, who was also ambassador to Saudi Arabia, calls Bush's escalation of military pressure "brinkmanship" - a term recalling the practice by president Dwight D Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles of threatening war against China over Korea and the Taiwan Strait.

"By deploying forces to add credibility to the threat," Freeman told Inter Press Service. "You increase the risk of military conflict, which is fact what is intended."