While the New York Times and other Western newspapers struggle with the big news of whether there were four or three Iranian missiles imaged in the photo from the Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, let us look at the deeper, darker, not nearly so widely reported reality Iran is really facing.

Aside from the fact that Israel has 200 nuclear missiles, and is slavering to unleash them on Iran, the United States Congress, as Seymour Hersh tells us in his article Preparing the Battlefield, “Late last year . . . agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources.

“These operations for which the president sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.”

Apart from ongoing secret anti-Iran ops, cross-border ops from Southern Iraq, with the prez’s blessing, including seizing Al Quds, commandos of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and hauling them to Iraq for interrogation; and the hunt for “high-value” targets to be killed or captured, the new scale of Iran ops, which involve the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) have been widely expanded, according to former officials. Surprise!

Of course the never-to-be-denied Bushman got his $400 million chestnut with a little bit of congressional oversight. Aside from all the language that tries to cover this illegality, “Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.” A militant Ahwazi group took credited for assassinating a Guard colonel, and the government acknowledged that an explosion in Shiraz, in southern Iran killed at least 12 people and injured more than 200.

It’s good to see your 400 million tax dollars working so hard. This new turning up of tensions actually generates support for the regime and proves to the people there is a threat from “the Great Satan.” It also strengthens not weakens Iran’s religious government. Hersh reports that the use of “ethnic minorities is flawed” and the US overestimates ethnic tension in Iran. But by passing money around, as one expert says, “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.” Good thinking, White House!

Robert Baer, former CIA clandestine officer who worked nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, said, “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. There are guys who cut off the heads of non-believers -- in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. We’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, convicted leader of the 1993 World Trace Center bombing (though the FBI would be a more appropriate culprit), and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (current goat for 9/11) are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

Hersh reports that one of the most violent, active, anti-regime groups in Iran is the Jundallah, known too as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, self-described as a resistance force fighting for Iran’s Sunnis’ rights. One expert has called them “a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists.” The Jundallah also claimed credit for bombing a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February 2007. According to Baer and press reports, Jundallah is one of the groups “benefiting from US aid.” Well spent millions once again.

Then we have some terrorists: the Mujihadeen e-Khalq (M.E.K), and a Kurdish separatist group, Party for a Free Life I Kurdistan (PJAK). Some of your 400 million may also end up in their pockets, and serve no real US purpose, if any, which has to do with the administration’s out of touch-ness with reality. These boys are also killing Revolutionary Guards to help cement bad feelings. Even Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said, “America’s covert operations seems to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connections between Tehran and Baghdad.”

Other Hersh highlights include a Pentagon consultant telling him, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flag operations, which are basic counter-intelligence and counter-insurgency tactics.” (And they worked so well in the USA on 9/11/2001.) He went to say, “And we’re beginning to tie them in knots of Afghanistan.” Of course, we can tell that by seeing the all-time surge in US deaths there last month.

Of course, Hersh reports, “A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that 73% of those surveyed thought that the US should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program while only 18% favored direct military action.” Let it never be said the Bush Group listened to the will of the people. After all, it is an executive-centric administration, a euphemism for empire.

These are the folks that also brought you “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR,” the infamous motorboat threatening “to explode” one of our carriers, a total hoax, even for the Pentagon. Nevertheless, Bush called the hoax “provocative and dangerous.” In fact, he is provocative and dangerous, which is why he should see three, four, missiles being buzzed in the air as a little smoke signal to the US that Iran has friends, too: China and Russia, to mention two, who could use the rich wonderful oil of the world’s fourth largest producer.

This may have prompted Bush on his farewell tour to have tea with Queen Lizzy II and dinner with Carla Bruni groupie French President Nicolas Sarkozy. They may have actually, according to Hersh, been dialoguing on the d-word for diplomatic efforts to get the pesky Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program, or is it Weapons of Mass Destruction plan, or affiliation with Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein plan or the boogeyman plan. It’s almost too ludicrous to believe that this nonsense actually threatens the world. But then, look at the little man with the silly mustache and the damage he did.

Then there is the other little man, not Bush, but McCain who is waiting in the wings to wage war for a hundred years, barely able to raise his Crusader’s Sword and looking for the Viagra of public opinion to give him the necessary lift. Why he’s even gotten Obama (your man for change), repeating that along with his “tough and principled diplomacy” he would “keep the threat of military actions against Iran on the table.” How much would you love to keep the lot of them under a net for the New American Century? Raise your hands if you dare.