Now Krauthammer is setting the stage for a bloody and criminal repeat in Iran. According to Krauthammer, talking with Iran is “pernicious folly” and would “short-circuit” sanctions, that is to say inflicting the sort of misery and privation on the Iranian people that Bush Senior and Clinton inflicted on the Iraqi people (1.5 million people killed by way of brutal medieval siege, 500,000 of them children). Of course, it took more than a decade to kill that many Iraqis and thus enfeeble the country in preparation for Bush the Younger’s invasion and occupation.

Krauthammer and the neocons are not interested in waiting around for a decade—they want Iran to suffer now. Negotiations over Iran’s completely legal—under the terms of the NPT—nuclear energy program, according to Krauthammer, would “produce endless new delays and give Iran more time to reach the point of no return, after which its nuclear status would be a fait accompli,” or so we are told by the Israelis and the neocons, both demonstrated pathological liars and criminals. Talking “is an obvious trap. We should resolutely say no” and commence with the bunker-busters and depleted uranium.

As Krauthammer sees it, the frenchified Europeans must be cut out of the negotiation loop and the “entire process” (of intransigence) must be shifted “back to Washington,” that is unless the Europeans support “U.S. and/or coalition military action against Iran in the event that the bilateral talks fail,” never mind that such “bilateral talks” are engineered to fail and fail miserably, thus opening the door for slaughtering thousands of Iranians. “The mullahs already fear economic sanctions; they will fear European-backed U.S. military action infinitely more. Such negotiations might actually accomplish something,” for instance, the demand Iran submit to the neocons, who are determined to balkanize the Muslim world, as long planned by the Israelis.

Krauthammer wrote his column in anticipation of Iran’s stated desire “to resume nuclear negotiations with the EU,” according to the Scotsman. Iran’s “mixture of conciliatory and defiant statements was unlikely to appease the United States [i.e., the neocons] and its allies who fear Iran could use even limited enrichment facilities to master the technology required to make atomic weapons.” Krauthammer also realizes the neocon agenda of mass murder may be stalled as the “U.N. Security Council powers and Germany will meet in Vienna on Thursday to finalize a package of incentives for Iran to halt enrichment along with penalties if it keeps defying international pressure…. Speaking in Malaysia on Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Tehran could resume dialogue with the United States, after an official freeze of 26 years, provided Washington changed its behavior,” that is the homicidal neocon insistence Iranians be slaughtered en masse.

Finally, Krauthammer and the Israel First neocons understand well that their covert war against Iran is failing. “The oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan, with has a sizeable ethnic Arab minority, has … seen a string of bomb attacks and apparent sabotage activity against oil and gas pipelines,” reports IranMania. “A recent wave of unrest has also rocked … Kurdish areas, where hardened separatists have apparently been encouraged by developments across the border in Iraq” and “southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan, a major throughfare for narcotics smuggled from Pakistan and Afghanistan, has also been hit by a string of attacks and kidnappings blamed on a shadowy hardline Sunni group called Jundallah,” or Allah’s Brigade. Iranian officials “have pointed the finger at British troops based just across the border in southern Iraq.” Hamid Reza Jalaipour, an Iranian analyst, told IranMania there “is a latent discontent among minorities, but I think that foreign intelligence services are also playing a role by supporting these movements.”

“The [neocons have] been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer [2003],” Seymour Hersh wrote for the New Yorker last January. “Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected.” According to a government consultant, the “civilians [neocons] in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” and of course, as in Iraq, the civilian infrastructure. Hersh would have us believe the Pentagon is primarily interested in targeting Iran’s illusory nuclear weapons program. However, as IranMania reveals (and other sources have revealed for months), covert British and United States intelligence operations are busy at work stirring up ethnic troubles in Iran, as they did in Iraq, thus promoting a “civil war” that will splinter Iraqi along ethnic and tribal lines.