Does anyone still believe the US will launch a full scale invasion of Iran?

[robertpaulsen]

I'm not talking about an airstrike to bomb their nuclear facilities, either through Israel or on our own. I'm talking about a full scale ground invasion to ensure "regime change". Just curious if anyone believes this will occur before Bush leaves office and why. Because I used to think so, but now I don't.

If Bush accepting Bolton's resignation isn't enough to make you believe that regime change in Iran hasn't been put on a permanent backburner, look who Dumbya is shaking hands with today:


Bush's Meeting With A Murderer
Robert Dreyfuss
December 04, 2006

President George W. Bush meets today with Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the turbaned leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite fundamentalist party that is strongly tied to Iran. In so doing, the president is meeting with someone who, perhaps more than anyone else in Iraq, is responsible for trying to destroy Iraqi national unity, prevent national reconciliation among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian mix, and push Iraq into civil war. Al-Hakim, who was virtually Fed-Ex’d into Iraq by the Pentagon in March 2003, was a mainstay of the Iraqi National Congress, led by neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi throughout the 1990s. And today al-Hakim controls the SCIRI militia, the Badr Brigade, the Iraqi interior ministry and many of Iraq’s feared death squads. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hakim is a mass murderer.

What’s stunning about Bush’s encounter with al-Hakim is that it occurs precisely at the moment when critically important bridges are being built across Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite divide—bridges that al-Hakim is trying to blow up.

During a stop in Amman, Jordan, on his way to the United States, al-Hakim point blank tried to torpedo the idea of an international conference that might bring together Iraq’s various factions. Such a conference was explicitly proposed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week, who offered to host it. A similar conference, or one like it, is likely to be part of the recommendations that will be issued on Wednesday by the Iraq Study Group, the panel co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Representative Lee Hamilton. But al-Hakim trashes the idea. “It is unreasonable or incorrect to discuss issues related to the Iraqi people at international conferences,” said the Shiite radical. “The proposal is unrealistic, incorrect and illegal.” (It is, of course, perfectly legal.)

It is not the first time that al-Hakim has tried to undermine reconciliation efforts. During repeated attempts by the Arab League to organize a conference that would bring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders together with representatives of the armed resistance in search of an accord, al-Hakim almost single-handedly destroyed the idea. And it is al-Hakim, whose SCIRI controls much of Iraq’s south, who is the driving force behind efforts to create a separatist Shiite-run state in Iraq’s south.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/12/04/bushs_meeting_with_a_murderer.php

If Dumbya were truly interested in fomenting regime change in Iran during his remaining two years in office, this is not the man you want to stab in the back. Which is exactly what invading Iran would accomplish. Dumb he may be, but I think Poppy's men are forcing him to acknowledge the political reality that while he and his neo-con friends may want to invade Iran, the painful truth is that they can't.