Former Israeli intelligence officer Avi Perry writes that a "surprise" Pearl Harbor-style Iranian attack on an American warship in the Persian Gulf will provide the pretext for the US to launch all-out warfare against Iran.

Given the fact that former Vice President Dick Cheney's office openly considered staging a false flag attack on a US vessel in the Persian Gulf to blame it on Iran as a pretext for war, Perry's summation of how "2012 will see to a new war," cannot be taken lightly.Under the headline The looming war with Iran, Perry writes;

Perry's use of quotation marks around the word "surprise" comes across as a literary device to imply that the so-called "surprise" attack will not be a surprise at all.Of course, the Pearl Harbor attack, which provided the pretext for America's formal entry into World War Two, was not a "surprise" by any means, it was known well ahead of time.Released Freedom of Information Act files prove that weeks before the December 7 attack by the Japanese, the United States Navy had intercepted eighty-three messages from Admiral Yamamoto which gave them details of precisely when and where the attack would take place.It's also completely nonsensical that Iran would actively seek to provide the world's pre-eminent nuclear superpower with an easy excuse to justify an attack by deliberately targeting US warships in the Persian Gulf. Perry's article seems to be a tongue-in-cheek admission that the US or Israel will manufacture such an attack.This presumption need not delve into the murky realm of conspiracy theories history tells us that fake naval attacks have been staged on numerous occasions to hoodwink the American people into supporting wars of aggression.Remember the Maine? The battleship USS Maine blew up while it was stationed in Havana harbor in February 1898. Although a Navy investigation could not find the cause of the explosion, the American media, led by pioneer of "yellow journalism" William Randolph Hearst, immediately blamed Spanish saboteurs, whipping the public into a war fever.When Hearst sent his reporter Frederick Remington to investigate, little of note could be established about the disaster. When Remington asked to be recalled, Hearst told him, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war.
"Hundreds of editorials demanded that the Maine and American honor be avenged. Many Americans agreed. Soon a rallying cry could be heard everywhere in the papers, on the streets, and in the halls of Congress: "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain."As a result of an incident that many consider to either be an accident or a deliberate false flag attack by the US on its own ship, the US was at war with Spain within months.Over 60 years later, another staged naval event, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was used as a pretext for the United States to launch the Vietnam war.President Johnson told the American public that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf. Leaked cables and recordings of White House telephone conversations later proved that the incident was completely manufactured, and that "our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets there were no PT boats there," according to Navy squadron commander James Stockdale, who was flying over the scene that night.There was almost a 21st century version mirror of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in January 2008, when the US government announced that it had been "moments" away from opening fire on a group of Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz after the boats allegedly broadcast a warning that they were about to attack a US vessel.The Iranian warning later turned out to be of dubious origin, but the incident led to a discussion in Vice-President Dick Cheney's office about how to start a war with Iran by launching a false flag attack at sea, according to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh.The January 2008 Strait of Hormuz incident taught Cheney and other administration insiders that, "If you get the right incident, the American public will support it". Hersh said: "There were a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don't we build, we in our shipyard', build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives".Given the dangerous nature of overlapping Iranian and US/Israeli naval drills set to take place in the same region at some point within the next two weeks, the potential for another staged incident at sea that will be exploited as a pretext for war remains a potent threat.*********************Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.