When your only tool is a hammer...

...everything looks like a nail.

Within minutes of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, John McCain was on the warpath...literally. He told his office staff "This is war" and he was all over the airwaves within hours, agitating for massive retaliation far beyond Afghanistan to other countries that have been accused of supporting terrorism. Of course his shortlist included Iran, Syria...and Iraq.

By sundown on September 11, 2001, the most dangerous place to be was between McCain and a media microphone.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

None of those countries were involved in the attacks against us, but the country was too shocked, too wounded, to apply the brakes to the NeoCon war machine.

In the simplistic NeoCon worldview, personified by McCain, the attacks were not so much a tragedy as they were an opportunity. To impose American hegemony, to settle old scores, to tell the Middle East to "suck on this."

“Just as Sept. 11 revolutionized our resolve to defeat our enemies, so has it brought into focus the opportunities we now have to secure and expand our freedom,” Mr. McCain told a NATO conference in Munich in early 2002, urging the Europeans to join what he portrayed as an all but certain assault on Saddam Hussein. “A better world is already emerging from the rubble.”

The emotion of the events overwhelmed him, and his caution about using American military force without a clearly defined mission, a specifically defined national interest...and an exit strategy.

McCain immediately became a willing tool of the Bu$h administration as it pushed for war to remake the region to conform to their vision of how things ought to be.

In fact, McCain was out in front of the administration in advocating for war on Iraq, making the case to the public fully six months before the administration started pitching the sale.

He would probably prefer that we forget that he stood four-square behind Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney back then - and that he was a supporter of the oft-discredited conman Ahmad Chalabi that conned this country into the war. McCain pushed Chalabi's suspect accusations all over the media.

He also promulgated the lies about Hussein's mythical WMDs and terrorist ties, including al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11.

Later, he blamed Iraq for his propensity to glibly assert facts not in evidence. Saddam ran an opaque show, you see, so it was his fault that McCain was out there lying his NeoCon ass off in an effort to gin up the war machine.

He isn't very good at absorbing lessons learned. He still stubbornly insists that Iraq was a danger, insisting just last week that “his regime posed a threat we had to take seriously.” Even though Iraq (nor Iran) were involved in the events of that horrible day, McCain last week repeated that the attacks were still a reminder of the importance of international action “to prevent outlaw states — like Iran today — from developing weapons of mass destruction.”

He has made the principle that the exercise of military power sets the bargaining table for international relations a consistent theme of his career ever since, and in his 2002 memoir he wrote that one of his lifelong convictions was “the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary’s provocation.”

Yes, indeed. When the only tool you have in your kit is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

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Ramping up the rhetoric

As the sand slips through the hourglass, the fear that aWol might not get to start another war with Iran is palpable and his rhetoric becomes increasingly shrill and disconnected from reality.

On Wednesday, Bush conducted an interview with the U.S. government run Farsi-language Radio Farda to mark the Iranian New Year. In that interview, Bush asserted that Iran has openly "declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people." He also insisted that the Iranian government might be hiding a secret program (in spite of a total lack of evidence to support the allegation.)

There is just one problem - it's pure unadulterated bullshit. A veritable tour de farce.

Iran has never staked any such claim, or even stated on the record a desire for nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The Iranian government has been quite adamant and insisting that the uranium enrichment program that it currently operates in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads.

Bush repeated his position that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear power, but insists that they should get the low-enrichment fuel from Russian rather than conduct their own refinement, but Tehran has repeatedly rejected that option. "The problem is the (Iranian) government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now. Who knows?" said Bush. "Secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people, some in the Middle East. And that is unacceptable to the United States and it's unacceptable to the world." (emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Iran has denied repeatedly that the country seeks nuclear warheads, and in 2005, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious edict forbidding the "production, stockpiling and use of such weapons."

Shortly after the White House released the transcript of the interview on Thursday, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe was on the hotseat and spinning so furiously that he threatened to generate his own gravitational field, dismissing the presidents remarks as "shorthand" for comments allegedly made by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the "World Without Zionism" conference in 2005, where he supposedly, by one translation of his remarks, stated his desire to see Israel "wiped off the map." People who actually speak Farsi have said unequivocally that the comments that this administration is determined to hang their "bomb Iran" policy from are vague and should not be interpreted as a threat to use force against Israel.

As their grip slips, as they lose control of the message, their desperation grows by leaps and bounds. The thoroughly diseased, discredited and debunked Neocon/PNAC political philosophy and agenda rooted in arrogance and hubris that has brought our country to the brink of disaster is increasingly viewed as an uncomfortable embarrassment to the less stupid among the craven fucks who subscribed to it. The few die-hards remaining are the most dangerous of the lot - all that is left are the cornered animals. And the psychotic desperation - and flat-out, pathological delusions - of the worst president ever grow every day. It's time to put impeachment back on the table.

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Dick Cheney needs a muzzle, a sturdy chain...and a tranquilizer dart

Remember how a couple of weeks ago, the story was that the Bush administration does not trust any future administration to 'deal with' Iran? Maybe you have forgotten, because the M$M – good little cocktail-weenie-wagging lackeys that they are - promptly moved along as if there was nothing to see there.

They certainly haven’t bothered to report on the hostilities we have been engaging in with Iran "below the CNN line" practically since the first days of the invasion, so what do we expect? But rest assured, Saddam had barely been toppled when the first American commandos were sent across the border into Iran, snooping for nukes.

On two borders, the US has combat troops, and in addition the U.S. encourages terrorism inside Iran. The U.S. materially supports Jundallah, and offshoot of al Qaeda, to commit terrorist acts inside Iran, staged from Pakistan. The Kurdish areas of Iraq are a nest of terrorists. They don’t just attack Turks. The Kurdish areas have been a staging ground for Kurdish paramilitaries to train; then they cross the border into the Kurdish areas of Iran and ambush Republican Guard troops. In addition, Iran has accused the United States of shooting down two of their military aircraft that were in Iranian airspace.

And now we have Dick Cheney, lunging for the end of the chain, snarling, foaming at the mouth and demanding more war.

Cheney, who's long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly about internal government deliberations.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposes this idea, the officials said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has stated publicly that "we think we can handle this inside the borders of Iraq."

Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokeswoman, said only that "the vice president is right where the president is" on Iran policy.

Bush left no doubt at his news conference that he intended to get tough with Iran.

"One of the main reasons that I asked Ambassador Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq was to send the message that there will be consequences for . . . people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs (improvised explosive devices), that kill Americans in Iraq," he said.

He also appeared to call on the Iranian people to change their government.

"My message to the Iranian people is, you can do better than this current government," he said. "You don't have to be isolated. You don't have to be in a position where you can't realize your full economic potential."

The Bush administration has launched what appears to be a coordinated campaign to pin more of Iraq's security troubles on Iran.

Those who are frothing at the mouth, all hot and bothered to get their war on with Iran need to sit down and listen up.

I am going to explain a few things in simple enough terms for even a conservative to understand, like why Iran would never fall like Iraq did. Put that notion down before it blows up and hurts someone, and consider some facts:

• Iranians have a strong national identity that is founded in common history; unlike Iraq, which was cobbled together from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, and occupied by Britain from 1917 to 1958. Iraq has existed for 90 years, and been occupied by “liberators” for 45 of them.
• Iran is four times the size of Iraq, with terrain that ranges from placid coastline to rugged mountains.
• The average male Iranian is just under 25 years of age.
• Iran has as many males between 15-64 as Iraq has total population
• Iran will not fall simply because a figurehead might be deposed. Iran will not fall so long as one Mullah remains alive anywhere in the country.
• Iran has a relatively modern military that has not been decimated by two decades of war and sanctions.
• Iran has the ability to shut down the passage of oil tankers, and send the price of oil to triple-digit per barrel prices.

In Iran, the Islamic Revolution was a means to an end, with the Ayatollah filling the role of ‘charismatic leader’ that is required of any revolutionary movement. It was the perfect combination of opportunity, true-believers, and opportunists, all coming together to overthrow a feckless thug, installed by a CIA coup that deposed the democratically elected Iranian Nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh, because he nationalized the oil industry, and pissed off the Brits. They wanted their oil company back, and that wag that didn't know his place gone. John Foster Dulles was all to happy to lend a hand.

In post revolutionary Iran, the Mullahs decreed the age of majority to be 15. Iranians can enter into contracts, marry, join the military and enjoy universal suffrage at 15 years of age. This has been an interesting social experiment, - control through empowerment. That data, just now coming in will be interesting to analyze once available.

When the average citizen is younger than the revolution, the revolution is over. Maybe not officially, but de facto. Birth rates are down from a post-revolution high of over 5 per woman to just under 2. The pig is passing through the snake, but it will be a discernible bulge for the foreseeable future. The average Iranian is around 25, in a population of over 65 million, while the Islamic revolution was 28 years ago come November.

The United States needs to realize that when dealing with Iranians, we are not dealing with a purely Islamic culture. Persian culture predates Islam by at least 1500 years, and the Persian people have not been invaded, conquered and occupied in modern times. Hell, not since the Arabs Islamized them seven hundred years ago.

We need to be engaging in diplomacy, even if it takes six months to decide ‘what will be the design and color of the peace table?’ We should also be engaging the country economically. They have a monolithic, one-dimensional energy economy. The Mullahs control the population by controlling the economy. Economic engagement would be far more effective than military engagement. (And no, I don’t mean by wrecking it – I mean by encouraging prosperity.)

Iran would present a military challenge in the best of times. With an overstretched and worn out military, the mere notion is madness on an epic scale. If we engage in diplomacy and economic diversification, the Mullahs fade from power in another decade. Start a shooting war, cement their power for 50-100 more years.

[*Note: The population of Iran has been corrected. Thanks to astute commenter Ben Cronin for pointing out my quite inexcusable error.]

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