“…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)
This suggests that this option might benefit from being held in abeyance until such time as the Iranians made an appropriately provocative move, as they do from time to time. In that case, it would be less a determined policy to employ airstrikes and instead more of an opportunistic hope that Iran would provide the United States with the kind of provocation that would justify airstrikes. However, that would mean that the use of airstrikes could not be the primary U.S. policy toward Iran (even if it were Washington’s fervent preference), but merely an ancillary contingency to another option that would be the primary policy unless and until Iran provided the necessary pretext.” -page 84-85 of ”Which Path to Persia?“ Brookings Institution, 2009.
Apparently, manufacturing such a “necessary pretext” to unilaterally bomb a nation of 70 million is now also a part of US foreign policy toward Iran. An oafish fabrication announced this week by Attorney General Eric Holder, consisted of an Iranian-American used-car salesman that “allegedly” attempted to hire an undercover US DEA agent, posing as a Mexican Los Zetas gangster, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would add “nobody could make that up, right?” Wrong.
The Fortune 500-funded US policy think-tank, Brookings Institution, in 2009 made it quite clear that the US would pursue its interests across the Middle East and would not tolerate a strong, assertive Iran standing in the way.