Starts with "I".

I'm not sure if it was Bush's intention to come off like a paranoid lunatic last Tuesday when he commented on the national intelligence estimate on the non-existent nuclear (or "nuke-you-ler" in Dubya speak) threat posed by Iran, but he certainly succeeded in doing so. Iran "will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon," he opined, giving a shrug of clueless arrogance that so eloquently expresses the inner workings of his tiny mind. Facts don't matter - this much we know. And the facts have been problematic for our president and vice-president as they have tried to nudge the American people ever closer to the brink of another optional war. But they were just as problematic with respect to Iraq, remember - the administration had nothing and was working overtime to provoke some kind of confrontation, without success (to their quite visible frustration).

They've been working up an alternative to the nuclear scenario for some time now, as Seymour Hersh reported a few months back - certainly the basic facts in this new NIE have been known to Bush and his advisors since at least last summer. But no Iranian nuclear program certainly does not mean no war. Lord knows the administration and members of both parties in Congress have been ratcheting up the rhetoric on alleged Iranian "interference" in Iraq all year long. I know I've been over that ground before, so I won't repeat myself. Suffice to say that our political leaders can always find a reason to send others into battle - that is certainly not unique to this age - and with the fiasco in Iraq now running at a steady simmer again instead of the rolling boil it reached a few months ago (providing you don't count the corpses we're generating), I'm sure they all feel as if we have one arm free. (Ask not for whom the dope shrugs... he shrugs for thee.)

So what's next? We know the WMD gambit doesn't work so well anymore. And the Iranian infiltrators toting E.F.P.'s story doesn't seem to be getting sufficient traction, perhaps because only a handful of the "foreign" (i.e. non-U.S.) fighters captured in Iraq have proven to be Iranians. (Many more Saudis in that group, actually. Why doesn't Bush want to invade Saudi Arabia? Friends there... many friends.) That leaves only the ever-useful fallback argument that we're saving the Iranian people from their tyrannical government. The "liberation" of Iran - has a familiar ring, doesn't it? Of course, that's the kind of rationale you don't hear much about until after the invasion... an appeal designed to make you feel guilty about saying you're against dropping bombs on people. We're bombing them to freedom! Trust me, when the Iraq war started, I was handed lame apologetics by otherwise reasonable people, and their rhetoric wasn't much more rational than that. That was before full-blown ethnic cleansing occurred in Iraq, with more than 2 million exiles living in Syria and Jordan, 2 million more internally displaced, and the Iraqi government (and U.S. military commanders) reluctant to bring them back for fear that it may begin again. So, no... that dog probably won't hunt, as the saying goes.

Nevertheless, Bush wants to invade some country that starts with "I", and it's obvious our pusillanimous Congress members won't stand up to it. Guess it's up to us.

luv u,

jp