It is as if the invasion of Iraq either never happened or was a stunning success.  The drumbeat for harsher measures against Iran is taking a strikingly familiar path to the buildup to the Iraq invasion six years ago, according to a new organization in Washington, DC.

Last week, an advertisement appeared in Capitol Hill publications.  The black and white photo of President George Bush and his then-Press Secretary Scott McClellan was under text reading, “Congress must not be left asking ‘What Happened?’ in Iran.”  McClellan made recent headlines for his insider account of the Bush administration’s dishonest campaign to mobilize support for invading Iraq.

The group that sponsored the ad, the Campaign for New American Policy on Iran (CNAPI), held an event at the Capitol on Tuesday, June 10th.  Along with the Enough Fear Campaign, they arranged for a display of phones to talk directly with Iranians.  The phones were 1960s-era red “hotline” telephones and they connected to “ordinary Iranians, including a 60-year-old petroleum engineer, a software engineer, a French literature professor and a high school student.”

The group pushes for full, bilateral diplomacy.

The Bush administration and advocates of a militant policy towards Iran are proceeding without regards for the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate.  The report showed that the evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program was scant.  Yet, the Bush administration presses Iran on the world stage, sending mixed, but ultimately militant signals.

In 2005, President Bush said “This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table.”  This makes the latest round of the administration’s moves on Iran seem like they are going through the motions for future military action.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned last week that the world has lost patience with Iranian delays and opposition to bargaining over its nuclear program.  Sound familiar?

And Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is increasingly portrayed as a mirror image of Iraq’s former dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Clamoring for sanctions is hardly diplomatic or fair.  The full embargo on Iraq in the 1990s, led by President Clinton’s administration, was a humanitarian disaster, leaving more than a million Iraqis dead according to conservative estimates.

Iran policy is surely headed for a dead end, the way it is going.  As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer opined, “Pushing for selective nuclear nonproliferation while using war and destruction as a threat is not effective diplomacy.”

As of yet, it is not clear that American foreign policy towards Iran will be much different for an Obama administration.  He co-sponsored the bill calling for sanctions on Iran.   After his show at the AIPAC conference, and his reliance on a foreign policy team of Clinton administration leftovers, it is hard to see his controversial declaration to talk with Iran as a serious policy deviation from what those with less patience are advocating.  As the Israeli government threatens Iran with an armed strike, the United States only appears steps behind on the world stage. 

On the rare occasion he breaks with the attack-Iran crowd, the language used by himself and the staff is alarming.  His staff told an Israeli journalist about a vote he officially took against naming the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as terrorists; it “gave a green light to premature military action against Iran.”  The key word was “premature.”

Even more alarming is Obama’s idea that diplomacy will be a way to build regional support for action against Iran. He told AIPAC that isolating America in the Middle East will mean “reducing our strength and jeopardizing Israel’s security.”  He pledged, “as president, I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.”

Short of an effective European intervention to quell the American drive to war, ordinary Americans should take the Obama campaign to task on Iran policy.  They should make it a campaign issue and challenge Senator McCain’s echoing of the White House’s militancy.  The millions of Americans who were right to challenge the war on Iraq, and the millions more who joined them after the invasion, need to re-mobilize to prevent this push for war with Iran.

Enough of the foreign policy establishment and many important interest groups are flanking the Bush administration’s quest for military action against Iran.  With Israel pushing for it, as it did with Iraq, an American adventure there will be disastrous.

Will Youmans is a writer for The Arab American News.