“Out of curiosity, I ran some Google searches.  The results were striking.

• “Iran’s disputed nuclear weapons program”: 4 hits
• “Iran’s possible nuclear weapons program”: about 8,990 hits
• “Iran’s civil nuclear program”: about 42,200 hits
• “Iran’s civilian nuclear program”: about 199,000 hits
• “Iran’s nuclear weapons program”: about 5,520,000 hits
• “Iran’s nuclear program”: about 49,000,000 hits.”

This is from a TomDispatch article.

Also: “A large majority of Americans believe that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program, 71% in 2010 and 84% this March.  Some surveys even indicate that a majority of Americans would support military action to stop Iran from developing nukes.”

I don’t know whether war with Iran is a realistic threat. It clearly benefits the US to make a credible threat. The US stands to lose a lot in such a war, at least the US people do, but what might their elites gain? Equally, as a threat to world peace as a whole it is an implicit or explicit threat to other states and formations such as Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, or the “BRIC” states, or the supposed “friends” of the US like the EU. In a way it means that no matter how much of an outlaw “Rogue State” the US is, between this and the economic and financial hegemony of the US, nothing substantive can be done to constrain the US.

The google data above, however, suggest something about thought control in modern society. The vast disparity in phraseologies is both the result of and the act of determining an agenda, controlling the idiom of a discourse. Mainstream news reporting has been compared to schools of fish, wherein individuals somehow know without information or instruction, the direction to pursue, the line to take. The same evidently applies to the blogosphere, the broader collection of information purveyors. They maintain the Party line by determining the language which may be used to apply thought to areas of interest.