the chorus for war with Iran

* henley:

"So the chorus for war with Iran crescendos, and will keep doing so. I should master my anger and contempt at the sheer cowardice involved, but it’s tag team cowardice, hard to decide where to focus first. There’s the strategic cowardice of the powerful and their lickspittles, the politicians and the operatives, in and out of “journalism,” who serve them. These people accrue power and prestige from fostering panic in others, and have discovered that the best way to do that is to act very very alarmed themselves. Then there’s the sincere cowardice of their flock, the hoi polloi of bloggers and comment trolls, each of whom whips himself into a luxuriant panic, like some Shiite or Philipino on martyr’s parade. It’s luxuriant because, deep down, our milquetoast knows who actually has the big bombs and who he expects to do the actual bombing, and whom he expects to do the actual getting bombed, and the latter ain’t him, despite his professed worries.

It is, to use the country’s new favorite word, insane. More than that, it’s sick. When the anti-interventionist elements of the Right declared aggressive war incompatible with republican virtue, this is the kind of thing they were thinking of. We start at shadows and blame the shade. We inflate the inability to conquer someplace with impunity into an existential threat to us. I don’t know which kind of coward infuriates me more, but neither one leaves me in the mood for sweet reason."

* emptywheel:

"Iran's not going to sit passively and let us invade it. They're just not. And this sure seems like it may be one move (Rook captures Bishop) in pre-empting an attack.

But in the end, I think merciless wasn't talking about how to get the Iranians to stop an Iranian invasion. We'd be much better off if we could do it, if we could get the Cheney Administration to climb down from its warhorse ourselves, to take care of the troops it had currently left exposed in Iraq.

All I can think of is to keep raising the consequences. The Cheney Administration is so focused on imposing consequences on Iran that it has ignored the consequences it is imposing on our own country."

* bob parry:

"Faced with George W. Bush’s disastrous policies in the Middle East and his adamant refusal to change course, the question now arises whether the President has become a “clear and present danger” to the security of the United States and, indirectly, to Israel."