America's march to a disastrous war in Iraq began in the media, where an unprovoked United States invasion of an Arab country was introduced as a legitimate policy option, then debated as a prudent and necessary one. Now, a similarly flawed media conversation on Iran is gaining momentum.
Last month, TIME's Joe Klein warned that Barack Obama administration sources had told him bombing Iran's nuclear facilities was "back on the table". In an interview with CNN, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Admiral Mike Hayden next spoke of an "inexorable" dynamic toward confrontation, claiming that bombing was a more viable option for the Obama administration than it had been for his predecessor, George W Bush.
The piece de resistance in the most recent drum roll of bomb-Iran alerts, however, came from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic Monthly. A journalist influential in US pro-Israeli circles, he also has access to Israel's corridors of power. Because sanctions were unlikely to force Iran to back down on its uranium enrichment project, Goldberg invited readers to believe that there was a more than even chance Israel would launch a military strike on the country by next summer.
His piece, which sparked considerable debate in both the blogosphere and the traditional media, was certainly an odd one. After all, despite the dramatics he deployed, including vivid descriptions of the Israeli battle plan, and his tendency to paint Iran as a new Auschwitz, he also made clear that many of his top Israeli sources simply didn't believe Iran would launch nuclear weapons against Israel, even if it acquired them.
