Are we already fighting in Iran?

Billmon presents some chilling statements.

When (not if) we attack Iran, there will be no Congressional resolution. Since the President has no political capital, he will simply give Congress about 24 hours notice and attack.

Then Billmon refers to a CNN interview with retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner:

...if you're going to do it, you're under a lot pressure not to just stir up the bees' nest, but to go after the stingers. I don't mean to be cute about that, but if there's going to about strike, you can't leave the medium-range ballistic missile unhit, you can't leave the air bases that are within 30 flying minutes of Baghdad unhit, you can't leave the chemical facilities unhit. You may want to hit the terrorist training camps.

So what happens is, very quickly, you end up with a relatively large operation, even though you started with just the nuclear sites.

Col. Gardiner also said in the same interview:

I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.[Snip]

...the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, "Hey, I hear you're accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units."

He said, quite frankly, "Yes, we know they are. We've captured some of the units, and they've confessed to working with the Americans."

The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made, and I don't know that the other part of that has been completed, that there has been any congressional approval to do this.

My view of the plan is, there is this period in which some kinds of ground troops will operate inside Iran, and then what we're talking about is the second part, which is this air strike.

There is a great deal more in Col. Gardiner's interview, so it is worth clicking through to the interview and scrolling down to Col. Gardiner's part of the transcript. Col. Gardiner also discusses how the Iranians are likely to respond to the air attacks.

That we might already be at war with Iran, without notification to Congress, is completely reasonable given Bush's idea that he is the great man set into office to do what no other politician of either party could do, and also given his belief in the uncontrolled power of the President when acting as Commander in Chief. It is already clear from the NSA domestic intercepts that he keeps such decisions secret from the Congress as well as the public.

I really hope that this is wrong. All the current evidence is that it is not, and nothing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Scott McClellan say can be trusted based on their consistent history of lying.

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Addendum
Digby at Hullabaloo weighs in on Col. Gardiner's interview with much the same set of speculations I posted above. He reports that Dennis Kucinich has written a letter to Bush asking of the allegations are true. Then Digby points to the story in Raw Story on April 13th that the U.S. is using an Iraqi terrorist group, MEK, in Iran at this time.

Digby also refers to the article by Sy Hersh published in January 2005 about a new covert action organization set up by the Pentagon. From Hersh:

In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. [Snip]

“The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. [Snip]

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran.

Hersh goes on to describe the view of the Hawks in the Bush administration as of early 2005.

[The] immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse” —like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”

This is the same kind of wishful thinking - magical thinking even - that the hawks used to justify the invasion of Iraq. I see no indication that as a group they have changed from the PNAC believers that led Bush into the Iraq invasion.