"And now Iran"

Members of the "Reality-based community" can arch their eyebrows and reply, "You and what army?" all they want, but the neo-cons are now officially hell-bent (and, yes, I mean that literally).

Doves profess concern about Iran's nuclear program and endorse various diplomatic responses to it. But they don't want even to contemplate the threat of military action. Perhaps military action won't ultimately be necessary. But the only way diplomatic, political, and economic pressure has a chance to work over the next months is if the military option--or various military options--are kept on the table.

Meanwhile, some hawks, defenders of the Iraq war, would prefer to deal with one challenge at a time. They hope we can kick the can down the road a while longer, or that a deus ex machine--a Jewish one!--will appear to do our job for us. But great powers don't get to avoid their urgent responsibilities because they'd prefer to deal with only one problem at a time, or to slough those responsibilities off onto others. To be clear: We support diplomatic, political, and economic efforts to halt the nuclear program of the Iranian regime. We support multilateral efforts through the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, and the assembling of coalitions of the willing, if necessary, to support sanctions and other forms of pressure. We support serious efforts to help democrats and dissidents in Iran, in the hope that regime change can be achieved without military action from the outside. We support strengthening our covert and intelligence capabilities. And we support holding open the possibility of, and beginning to prepare for, various forms of military action.

You can be sure, Kristol knows that when he espouses "preparing for various forms of military military action" he is, in fact, espousing military action, and just as soon as those landing strips in Azerbaijan can be lengthened for the B-52s, and the Big Red One has been amassed on Iraq's western boarder. You want an exit-stategy in Iraq, he might as well ask. Well, I'll give you one. Let's leave Iraq by invading Iran!

If I thought there was any level of competence and foresight within the current administration or the Pentagon, I might even cynically assume that Iraq was in fact a pretext for invading Iran. Knowing that without better intelligence indicating Iran's nuclear sites air strikes alone won't cut it, what better way to move 150,000 troops into the Mullahs' backyard without them smoking it out? Of course, there is no competence in those institutions, so this is all just some kind of happy coincidence.

We are now heading down the path of war in Iran. And, like Iraq, the neocons and their enablers in the White House and Pentagon are once again making elaborate plans for "regime change." And once again, like Iraq, they are making plans without ever taking into account the fact that "the enemy" consists of sentient beings. Just as one commander in Iraq pointed out a year or so ago, that the insurgency wasn't part of the pre-Iraq war games, so too those leading the cheers (though never the charge) for war in Iran are assuming that the regime there will simply comply with our plans.

G ardiner remained at the podium to answer questions as the CentCom commander, and the discussion began. The panelists skipped immediately to the regime-change option, and about it there was unanimity: the plan had been modeled carefully on the real assault on Iraq, and all five advisers were appalled by it.

"You need to take this back to Tampa," David Kay said, to open the discussion. Tampa, of course, is the headquarters for CentCom units operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Or put it someplace else I'd suggest, but we're in public." What was remarkable about the briefing, he said, was all the charts that were not there. "What were the countermoves?" he asked. "The military countermoves—not the political ones you offloaded to my Secretaries of State but the obvious military countermoves that the Iranians have? A very easy military counter is to raise the cost of your military operation inside Iraq. Are you prepared to do that?"

Hell, even our diplomatic options are limited, and even there the administration seems unable to grasp that Iran has options as well. Right now, it is in their interest that Iraq not ignite into total chaos. That could well change if they feel that we're putting too much pressure on them or that we're going to act unilaterally against them.

The Bush administration failed to deal with Iran for five years. Five years in which Iran was "governed," at least nominally, by a moderate. Now, we have to deal with a populist demagogue who uses language only the most shameless of neo-con mystery writers could come up with.

I've often wondered if Dick Cheney were an agent of Iran, given how successful Iran's regime has been in having our military attack their rival and grant power to their Shi'ite allies. Now I wonder if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad isn't, in turn, an agent of the neocons.