It is truly a travesty that our MSM is incapable of reading the same tea leaves as the Foreign Press does... Here's a recent compilation of foreign papers on the gathering war clouds above Iran...

From Gulfnews

The signs indicate a joint US/Israeli effort against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah may be on the cards but, of course, we cannot discount the possibility that the drum beating is nothing more than an attempt to intimidate Tehran. There are many pundits so minded simply because a US attack on Iran would have such far reaching consequences it is considered neither logical nor feasible. Ordinarily I would agree with them. A military assault on Iran is madness. It will destabilise the region, increase terrorism around the world, hike oil prices to unprecedented levels and slash already fragile economies.

But these are far from being ordinary times. Elements of the Bush administration led by Cheney are single-minded and ruthless when it comes to adhering to their long-held New Middle East agenda. Now that Iraq is in their clutches from their point of view the only bulwark blocking their desire for total American hegemony of the Middle East is Iran.

If and when Iran is out of the loop, the puissance of anti-US Iraqi Shiites will diminish while funding and the supply of weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas will eventually dry up. That's the thinking but, in reality, there's many a slip between cup and lip as we witnessed during the 2006 Israel/Lebanon war when Tel-Aviv received a surprise bloodied nose and more recently during the Basra fiasco.

In this case, it's unknown how Russia, which currently has warships off Syrian ports, might respond. Moscow isn't itching for a fight but it would stand to lose much of its geopolitical and economic clout in the area should the US manage a total takeover and its already smarting over a White House initiative to bring Nato up to its borders and install an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

With only another nine months in office and a tattered presidential legacy, George W. Bush has everything to gain in embarking on another deadly adventure. Iran may be his last roll of the dice with winner takes all. He's already one of the most unpopular US presidents in history so even if things go wrong he's got little to lose. He can just walk away and leave his successor and this stricken part of the world to pick up the shards of his failures.

From Arab News

Iran is being demonized for a purpose. The deliberately orchestrated hype and fear mongering obscures the reality. There is no evidence that Iran is working toward the production of nuclear weapons as a US National Intelligence Estimate clearly stated and far from threatening its neighbors it is going out of its way to extend the hand of friendship to all except Israel, which, by the way, President Ahmadinejad did not advocate wiping off the map. His words were mistranslated and the Western media shirked its duty to correct the mistake.

The fact is Iran remains the last obstacle to America’s complete domination of this region. If Washington could force Iran to do its bidding its hegemonic ambitions in this part of the world including control over its resources would be attained. This, my friends, is the bottom line. This is why Iraq was invaded and occupied and this is why Iran is being groomed to go the same way.

Weakening Iran is just another phase of the neoconservative New Middle East itinerary, which has nothing to do with spreading freedom and democracy and all to do with increasing US power and that of its regional satellite Israel. If you look at it from the American/Israeli perspective, a defanged Iran might translate into a compliant Shiite population, and the eventual demise of Hezbollah and Hamas due to a lack of funding and weapons.

But this truth isn’t palatable to most ordinary people and flies in the face of international law. So, just as the US contrived to come up with a pretext — or rather a series of pretexts — to invade Iraq, it has had to find excuses to sanction Tehran, perhaps as a prelude to military action.

From DEBKAfile

According to British media, the US is set to attack Iranian military facilities. DEBKAfile’s military sources add that the USS Abraham Lincoln Strike Force is heading for the Persian Gulf.

War tensions in the Middle East have shot up - not only over the signals flashing between Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, but also on the US-Iranian front in Iraq in the wake of rising in violence around the Basra conflagration.

Tuesday, April 8, US Iraq commander, Gen. David Petraeus and ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, will stress in their report to Congress that Iran is waging war on America in Iraq, say sources in Washington, London and Baghdad.

This emerged strongly last week, when US intelligence learned that Iran had intervened directly in the Iraqi government’s crackdown on renegade militias in Basra and southern Iraq, by directing and provisioning those militias through the Revolutionary Guards’ al Qods Brigades.

Official sources in London predict that Iran’s intervention against the American effort to stabilize Iraq may well prompt a US attack on the military installations in Iran which are orchestrating the interference.

Gen. Petraeus is on record as accusing Iran of being the source of the daily rocket bombardment of Baghdad’s Green Zone, seat of government and US diplomatic and military headquarters.

Well, I could go on with others, but, you get the point! What has our MSM have to say about the war clouds...? That's right *crickets* nada, zippo, zilch... A tragic tale, indeed! If you actually see something from our pathetic News Corpse, please leave a link in the comments!