Scott Ritter: The war on Iran has begun.

You're no dummy if you are appointed chief UN weapons Inspector at the tender age of 38. Christ, that's how old I am now. I remember a couple of years ago hearing Scott Ritter in an interview with Richard Glover on the ABC's Sydney station 702. Whilst I can't remember what was said the gist was in general that there was a lot of pokery jiggery going on in the background in Iraq. He was forthright and surprisingly open.

Ritter went very public with the goings for which he gained my admiration. Perhaps his reasons are a case of sour grapes syndrome or perhaps he actually did face an ethical pang of conscience based on the bullshit he observed. The resulting outing of "how things actually were" saw him shunned from the cosy six or seven figure salary and a consultancy that most people in power tend to look forward to in their retirement.

So he's now working for the "other guys" at Al Jazeera after working for "our guys" at Fox. The muzzle is off and he tells it as it is again.

His latest article describes how the war against Iran in all likelihood has already started.

"Liberation" and the spread of "democracy" have become none-too-subtle code words within the neo-conservative cabal that formulates and executes American foreign policy today for militarism and war.

By the intensity of the "liberation/democracy" rhetoric alone, Americans should be put on notice that Iran is well-fixed in the cross-hairs as the next target for the illegal policy of regime change being implemented by the Bush administration.

But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream.

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by



Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

Perhaps the adage of "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror.