Rising chance of Iran War

My increased worry over Iran hostilities due to the Fallon resignation finds a reflection in Intrade trading. The September contract has been at a comfortably low level of 10 (out of 100 which equals certainty of an airstrike) since mid-December after the NIE report came out. Now it has jumped to 23 on the Fallon news.

The NIE report is now old news and the Bushites picked at it enough to diminish its impact. So now, in all likelihood, Bush is simply picking up where he left off before that report came out. He’s getting ready to make war on Iran.

Other signs: (1) The U.S. has frozen the assets of a Bahrain bank controlled by an Iranian lender. (2) Cheney is touring the Middle East next week. (3) Two U.S. warships have positioned near Lebanon, replacing the U.S.S. Cole. (4) Israeli President Peres has said this month that Israel would not act unilaterally against Iran. (5) The latest U.N. sanctions are too weak to satisfy this administration.

The relentless rise in oil and other commodity prices is the kind of thing that war or the prospect of war causes.

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5:43 pm on March 12, 2008