Care for another war, anyone?

Thanks to Larry C Johnson (NO QUARTER) again for keeping us abreast of the mess in Iraq. For quite a while he was a fairly lone voice. Now the mainstream media is falling all over themselves in their attempts to make up for all the brown-nosing they did leading up to the Iraq war and for the first two years following the U.S. invasion.

Mr. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and current intelligence consultant, relays CNN's Wolf Blitzer's interview of retired U.S. Army colonel Pat Lang, former chief of Mideast intelligence at the Pentagon. What Lang says, in short, is that the Bush Administration keeps ratcheting up the confrontational stakes with Iran, and by doing so it puts the U.S. forces in Iraq in a very dangerous place (as if they aren't already!). Key excerpts:

BLITZER: Well, what would happen if the U.S. does kill these Iranians and the president has signed off on it?...

LANG: They could retaliate against U.S. forces in Iraq in a big way.

BLITZER: How could they do that?

LANG: They have hundreds of thousands of people from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard corps already in Iraq.

BLITZER: Hundreds of thousands?

LANG: Oh, yes. That's a well-established figure that's though to be true across the community of people that look at this. And they're there as liaison personnel with the very Shia militias and things like that. And if they get sufficiently angry with us, they can start retaliating directly against our forces....

BLITZER: What the American public wants to know is, the vulnerability, what's going to happen to 160,000 or so American troops in Iraq over the next six months to a year?

LANG: Over the next year, I would say that we're going to have a situation which will not improve markedly. But we will still have approximately the same number of people in Iraq. And a year from now, say in the middle of '08, we will be facing a situation in which that things will not have greatly improved but we'll still be there.

BLITZER: It will basically the same as what's happening right now, is that what you're saying?

LANG: I'm afraid that's true.

The entire transcript is here.