So How Close Is a Showdown Over Iran?

By Paul Harris, Gaby Hinsliff and Robert Tait, The Observer UK

News of British involvement in a mock invasion of Iran is just the latest step in what seems a slow slide to war.

It would seem, to Middle Eastern eyes scanning the latest headlines online yesterday, yet further evidence of secret plans for the conflict that everyone is now dreading. Britain, it was suggested, had taken part in an American war game that simulated an invasion of Iran, in an apparent mockery of both countries' insistence that they want a diplomatic - not a military - solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

But in the overheated atmosphere of current debate over Iran, nothing is quite what it seems. The simulated battle, fought in 2004 and codenamed Hotspur, was in fact one of a series of 'paper exercises' that have been conducted every few weeks by senior military planners on both sides of the Atlantic since the Sixties to test strategic readiness. Each time, a different country is invaded.

To save inventing new topography every time, maps of real countries around the world are used in strict rotation. In July 2004 - before the current president came to power in Tehran - it happened to be Iran. A few weeks ago, it was Scotland. If Tehran is panicking as a result of the story, so too should Edinburgh.

For all that, the story on the front page of yesterday's Guardian is an indication, if not of imminent invasion, of an intense period of smoke and mirrors both in Washington and Tehran: of posturing, lobbying and hyperbole that is as much to do with the domestic politics of the US and Iran, as with the threat posed by either country.

The war talk comes as a new report will argue this week that George Bush's war on terror is itself to blame for the nuclear stand-off over Iran.

The regime in Tehran has concluded, says the Foreign Policy Centre think-tank, that the US is too bogged down fighting the insurgency in Iraq to try to stop the Iranians getting the bomb, making their defiance of the United Nations 'one of the little-noticed consequences of America's failure in Iraq'.

Controversially, it also argues that Iran 'cannot be entirely faulted' for seeking nuclear capability when it feels threatened by US troops in neighbouring countries and saw North Korea, a nuclear power, left untouched while the relatively undefended Iraq was invaded.

Which leaves a fundamental question to be answered. Amid the fanning of the flames by both sides, how real is the prospect of war?
-continued-