One of the nation’s leading pollsters, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, wrote a few weeks ago that among Americans "there is little potential support for the use of force against Iran." This month the White House has continued to emphasize that it is committed to seeking a diplomatic solution. Yet the U.S. government is very likely to launch a military attack on Iran within the next year. How can that be? In the runup to war, appearances are often deceiving. Official events may seem to be moving in one direction while policymakers are actually headed in another. On their own timetable, White House strategists implement a siege of public opinion that relies on escalating media spin. One administration after another has gone through the motions of staying on a diplomatic track while laying down flagstones on a path to war.

Several days ago President Bush said that "the doctrine of prevention is to work together to prevent the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon" — and he quickly added that "in this case, it means diplomacy." On April 12 the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, urged the U.N. Security Council to take "strong steps" in response to Iran’s announcement of progress toward enriching uranium. Bush and Rice were engaged in a timeworn ritual that involves playacting diplomacy before taking military action…

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MoveOn.org sent out an email with the subject line Don’t Nuke Iran to three million people on April 12. "There is one place where all of us can agree: Americans don’t support a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran, and Congress must act to prevent the president from launching one before it’s too late," the message said. And: "Please take a moment to add your name to our petition to stop a nuclear attack on Iran."

The petition’s two sentences only convey opposition to a "nuclear" attack on Iran: "Congress and President Bush must rule out attacking Iran with nuclear weapons. Even the threat of a nuclear attack eliminates some of the best options we have for diplomacy, and the consequences could be catastrophic."

In MoveOn’s mass email letter, the only reference to a non-nuclear attack on Iran came in a solitary sentence without any followup: "Even a conventional attack would likely be a disaster."

"Likely" be a disaster? Is there any U.S. military attack on Iran that plausibly would not be a disaster?

There’s no way around the conclusion that the signers of the letter ("Eli, Joan, Nita, Marika and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team") chose to avoid committing themselves — and avoid devoting MoveOn resources — to categorical opposition to bombing Iran…

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Weeks after a British magazine published a long article by two American professors titled “The Israel Lobby,” the outrage continued to howl through mainstream U.S. media.

A Los Angeles Times op-ed article by Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot helped to set a common tone. He condemned a working paper by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was excerpted last month in the London Review of Books.

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Is President Bush guilty of war crimes?

To even ask the question is to go far beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media.

A few weeks ago, when a class of seniors at Parsippany High School in New Jersey prepared for a mock trial to assess whether Bush has committed war crimes, a media tempest ensued.

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Top officials in the Bush administration have often complained that news coverage of Iraq focuses on negative events too much and fails to devote enough attention to positive developments. Yet the White House has rarely picked direct fights with U.S. media outlets during this war. For the most part, President Bush leaves it to others to scapegoat the media.

Karl Rove’s spin strategy is heavily reliant on surrogates. They’re likely to escalate blame-the-media efforts as this year goes on.

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On Saturday, during her national radio response to the president, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the Bush administration of “incompetence” in the Iraq war.

What would be a competent way to pursue the war in Iraq? How would you drop huge bombs on urban neighborhoods in a competent way? How would you deploy cluster munitions that shred the bodies of children in a competent way? How would you take hundreds of thousands of people from their home land and send them to a country to kill and be killed — based on lies — in a competent way?

How do you ravage the housing and health care and education of communities across the United States, while war-profiteering corporations post bigger profits — how would you do that in a competent way?

Senator Feinstein went on to say that it’s so important, for the war in Iraq, for the United States government to “do it right.”

How does one do this war right, when every day it brings more carnage? The only way to do this war right is to not do it at all…

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The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion is bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition will go to the pundits who helped to make it all possible.

Continuing with long service to the Bush administration’s agenda-setting for war, prominent media commentators were very busy in the weeks before the invasion. At the Washington Post, the op-ed page’s fervor hit a new peak on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Colin Powell’s mendacious speech to the U.N. Security Council…

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As each new season brings more waves of higher-tech digital products, I often think of Mark Twain. Along with being a brilliant writer, he was also an ill-fated investor — fascinated with the latest technical innovations, including the strides toward functional typewriters and typesetting equipment as the 19th century neared its close.

Twain would have marveled at the standard PC that we take for granted now. But what would he have made of the intrusiveness of present-day media technology — let alone its recurring content?

It’s getting harder and harder to drive out of cell-phone range — that is, if you really want to. And judging from scenes at countless remote locations, many people would rather not forfeit 24/7 phone access for conversations that involuntary eavesdroppers hear half of. (Virtually always, it seems, the more boring half.)

These days, mainstream media fascination with blogs and the bloggers who love them often seems to assume that the very use of the Internet enhances the content or style of what has been written. It’s a seductive cyber-fantasy. Speed is useful, and so are hyperlinks and visuals-on-demand, but — fortunately or not, depending on your point of view — there’s no digital invisible hand that can move any piece of writing very far along the road to worthwhile reading…

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Evidently the president’s trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world’s leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first half of the 20th century. So the White House announced plans for George W. Bush to lay a wreath at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi this week.

While audacious in its shameless and extreme hypocrisy, this PR gambit is in character for the world’s only superpower. One of the main purposes of the Bush regime’s media spin is to depict reality as its opposite. And Karl Rove obviously figured that mainstream U.S. media outlets, with few exceptions, wouldn’t react with anywhere near the appropriate levels of derision or outrage.

Presidential rhetoric aside, Gandhi’s enthusiasm for nonviolence is nearly matched by Bush’s enthusiasm for violence…

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