anyone from the American government or its British arm, Tony Blair, mention the word 'Iran'. This triggers powerful memories, known as 'flashbacks', and the patient suffers from a form of confusion and bewilderment that has been given the name 'Annum Uncertainty Disorder'. They can't distinguish between 2007 and 2003.

I have told the sufferers I know not to worry because what they are experiencing is perfectly natural. It is the psychological consequence of observing people with the chronic condition long suffered by the British and American governments and known as 'Whopper's Disease'. This is an extreme version of Tarradiddle Disorder. Tarradiddle is defined in the dictionary as 'silly pretentious speech or writing; twaddle'. The synonyms offered include fib; lie; prevarication - a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth; cock-and-bull story; fairy story; fairytale; song and dance - an interesting but highly implausible story, often told as an excuse;

silly talk or writing; baloney; bilgewater; bosh; drool; humbug; tommyrot; tosh; hokum; nonsense; bunk; and cant - a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves).

All the above apply as we observe the truly pathetic sight of the Bush cabal desperately seeking an excuse to tick off the next country in their campaign of global tyranny - Iran. In September 2000, months before the Bush administration came to power in a rigged election, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) published its plan for global conquest called Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, And Resources For A New Century. This organisation was controlled by the very people who came to power with Bush, including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz who would run the Pentagon, and soon-to-be Vice President Dick Cheney, or 'Brutal' to those who know him. This PNAC crowd have become known as neo-conservatives or neo-cons. Neo-Nazis more like.

PNAC members Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld

As you would expect, all but a few in the mainstream media ignored the document at the time and even with hindsight when it became clear that this was the blueprint the Bush administration was working to. The PNAC document called for the targeting of Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea among others and, hey presto, those are the countries, along with Afghanistan, that they have indeed set their sights upon since coming to power. It was the neo-con speechwriter David Frum who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil' for 'Iraq, Iran and North Korea in Bush's State of the Union address in 2002.

First it was Iraq and then came the verbal attacks on North Korea which will return again no matter what they are saying now because there is a sequence they have planned and North Korea is further down the page than Iran. I said in my newsletter at the start of 2006 that the year would see the gathering focus on Iran as a 'danger to the world' and so it was. But the experience in Iraq has made another war more difficult to 'sell' to an ever-more street-wise populous, large swathes of which are beginning to know a lie when they hear one.

The propaganda war against Iran really picked up after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of the Islamic Republic in 2005. After he took office in the August he was soon making speeches that the American propagandists and spinners must have dreamed of. I cannot believe this was a fortuitous coincidence. He defeated the one-time favourite, the former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani whose reputation and record would have made it almost impossible to demonise Iran as a threat to America or anyone else.

Mehdi Karroubi, a Reformist candidate seeking to open Iranian society and oppose the extremes of hardline Islam, finished a good third in the first round of voting. He then alleged that a network of mosques, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Basij militia forces had illegally generated support for Ahmadinejad and specifically named Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the Supreme Leader Ayatolla Khamenei, as being involved in this election fraud. The Ayatollah told Karroubi that the allegations were below his dignity and he would not allow the crisis in Iran that they could cause. Karroubi wrote back, resigning from all his political posts and some Reformist newspapers were stopped from publication for publishing Karroubi's letter.

I am not saying that Ahmadinejad was manipulated into power because I don't know, but I suspect that is what happened, not least with the long history of covert involvement in Iran by British and American military intelligence which ousted Prime Minister Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 in a CIA-planned coup called Operation Ajax; imposed the vicious Shah of Iran as a dictator; and then removed him for the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Why would the same forces not continue to be involved in election manipulation in Iran when they so badly needed Ahmadinejad to defeat Rafsanjani for their 'Axis of Evil' plan to work? It doesn't even need Ahmadinejad to be aware of what has happened behind the scenes in the same way that Margaret Thatcher wasn't aware when she was manipulated into power in Britain, also in 1979. They knew what she would basically do and say because they knew how she saw the world and what she believed in.

Either Ahmadinejad is knowingly involved or he's an idiot because all he needed to do was to quietly get on with his job and leave the nuclear development alone for a while and he would have had the neocon-Nazis with nowhere to go. He must have known that Iran was on the hit-list, but he still opened his mouth and the propagandists walked right in.

However, it is not only the planet that is undergoing climate change, so is the collective human mind. After Iraq it is far harder to justify an invasion of Iran and the desperation betrayed in the daily excuse-making has me squirming in the chair. They are so bereft of ideas, and a genuine reason, that the Iraq file, now utterly discredited, has been retrieved from the bin. We are told that Ahmadinejad could be 'another Hitler', which is what they said about Saddam Hussein, and they have simply dusted off the old song sheet. They said that Iraq was dangerous because of (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the West. They say that Iran's nuclear program is designed to produce nuclear weapons that could be used against the West. They said that Iraq had (non-existent) connections with 'al-Qaeda'. They say that Iran is supplying weapons to terrorist 'insurgents' in Iraq. This is making n! o impact whatsoever on anyone who can still claim ownership to their neuron activity and I suspect they are planning events to 'up the ante', the definition of which is to 'increase the importance or value of something, especially where there's an element of risk as the term comes from gambling, where it means to increase the stake'.

Gambling is the word because there is a timescale for their global conquest and Iran is in danger of stopping the clock if they don't make a move pretty soon. The fact that they intend to is confirmed by the military build up going on within shooting distance of the Iranian border - precisely what happened with Iraq as the preparations became ever more detailed while Bush and Blair were saying that 'no decision to invade had been taken'. Round ones. Of course it had been made and many years before. The same is now true with Iran.

The respected New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh is rightly acknowledged for his exposure over the years of government secrets and mendacity, but without the coordinates of what the game is, how it is played and what it seeks to achieve you can get seriously lost in the maze and mirrors. In a recent article he talked of a 'redirection' in the U.S. Middle East strategy. He said the key players behind the 'redirection' are Vice-President Dick Cheney; the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams; the departing Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, the nominee for United Nations Ambassador; and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. All these people have been exposed so often in my books going back to the mid 1990s that their ears must be ablaze. The 'new' plan and 'redirection', we are told, is to use the divisions between the Islamic 'Sunni' and 'Shiite' factions that have deepened into outright civil war in Iraq. The ! Sunnis and Shiites, by the way, argue over the right to be their caliph or leader. Here is one explanation at History News Networks:

'The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliph - Mohammed's successors - rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War. Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed.'

What's the Arabic for grow up?

'I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.'

'Okay, I'm a liar.'

Secretary of State Condo-sleezza Rice said in January that there was 'a new strategic alignment in the Middle East', separating 'reformers' and 'extremists' (classic Orwellian Newspeak). She said the Sunni states were the 'centres of moderation' (they do as they're told), while Shiite-controlled Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon were 'on the other side of that divide'. Iran and Syria, she said, 'have made their choice and their choice is to destabilise'. And who were two of the target states in the Project for the New American Century document in September 2000? Iran and Syria. This is why the speeches that Bush is told to read contain the same ever-present mantra:

'These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq ... Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.'

Translated from the Orwellian it means: 'We're going to have yet another war'.

Let's get one thing crystal clear. What is happening in the Middle East is not a 'new' policy, nor is it a 'redirection'. It is the continuation of a policy that was decided long before the first missile scorched the Iraqi skyline. I have been saying through all the condemnations of U.S. government 'incompetence' in Iraq that it is not incompetence. The numbskull president has not been orchestrating the plan, minds of great intellect have been doing it. Sick they may be, but intellectually at least they are not stupid.

The plan all along has been to play Sunni against Shiite to divide and rule the Middle East and now we are seeing the stage where they seek to take advantage of that by isolating their targets, Iran and Syria, from the rest of the Arab world led by Saudi Arabia, or Saudi America as it should rightly be called. The policy 'shift', we are told, has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a 'new strategic embrace', largely because 'both countries see Iran as an existential threat'. Oh, I think they've been having a covert cuddle for a long time, you know, given that they are both controlled by the same force. Once Iran and Syria fall, the plan is to pick off all the rest who will by then come more quietly.

USS Eisenhower ... waiting to strike

The preparations for this are nearing completion. U.S. Central Command or 'CentCom' has advanced plans in place for a 'Shock and Awe' attack on Iran's military infrastructure and nuclear facilities and aircraft carriers are being deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of this unfolding strategy. One group led by the USS Eisenhower is already there and another led by the USS John Stennis is on the way. This represents the biggest concentration of naval capability since the Iraq invasion kicked off four years ago. More aircraft and Air Force personnel are being moved to forward bases in Bulgaria and Rumania and it is not a case of if the invasion happens, but when.

The U.S. military has arrested and interrogated hundreds of Iranians in Iraq, according to the sources of Seymour Hersh. 'The word went out last August for the military to snatch as many Iranians in Iraq as they can', a former senior intelligence official told him.

'They had five hundred locked up at one time. We're working these guys and getting information from them. The White House goal is to build a case that the Iranians have been fomenting the insurgency and they've been doing it all along-that Iran is, in fact, supporting the killing of Americans.'

Hersh said the Pentagon consultant confirmed that hundreds of Iranians have been captured by American forces in recent months, including many Iranian humanitarian and aid workers who 'get scooped up and released in a short time', after they have been interrogated. This is what happened in Afghanistan and to others in Iraq who ended up in Guantanamo Bay and prisons like Abu Ghraib or simply disappeared. It's now obvious that the 'Iran is killing our troops in Iraq' strategy is the mendacity of choice and, as writer Paul Krugman pointed out in The New York Times, it overcomes the need to win approval on Capitol Hill:

'... if you can claim that Iran is doing evil there, you can assert that you don't need authorization to attack - that Congress has already empowered the administration to do whatever is necessary to stabilize Iraq. And by the time the lawyers are finished arguing - well, the war would be in full swing.'

Cheney says that 'every option is on the table' to 'deal' with Iran and that is always Newspeak for 'we are going to invade'. I am seeing so many articles saying what a catastrophe it would be. One of them said:

'Taken together, the Bush administration's strategy for the Middle East--stretching from Lebanon and Syria to Iran and the Gulf states--can only produce a catastrophe for working people throughout the region, in the United States and internationally. Any US attack on Iran has the potential to plunge the entire Middle East into conflict, drawing in America's European and Asia rivals, whose vital economic and strategic interests are at stake. Having gambled and lost with their criminal invasion of Iraq, the gangsters in the White House are doubling their bets across the board and dicing with the future of humanity.'

All true, but the point is missed again. It is meant to be 'a catastrophe for working people throughout the region, in the United States and internationally'. It is meant to 'plunge the entire Middle East into conflict, drawing in America's European and Asia rivals, whose vital economic and strategic interests are at stake'. It is meant to dice 'with the future of humanity'.

We are dealing with a force behind these thugs-in-government who care nothing for the consequences of anyone or anything. Their quest for global domination is all that matters and to achieve that, anything goes. Ask the victims of 9/11 and the people of Afghanistan, Lebanon and Iraq.

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' ... the plan is to engineer events, real and staged, that will create enormous fear in the countdown years to 2012. This includes a plan to start a third world war, either by stimulating the Muslim world into a “Holy War” against the West, or by using the Chinese to cause global conflict. Maybe both.'

- David Icke (The Biggest Secret, 1998)