US and Israeli leaders are talking themselves into a disastrous conflict that will make Iranian nuclear weapons a certainty

After a decade of calamitous western wars in the wider Middle East, the signs are becoming ever more ominous that we're heading for another. And, hard as it is to credit, the same discredited arguments used to justify the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan – from weapons of mass destruction to sponsorship of terrorism and fundamentalist fanatics – are now being used to make the case for an attack on Iran