Head, Meet Wall

For two years now, I (along with many others) have been writing about the narrative for continuing war put out by the Bush administration and the neocon Wormtongues that surround it. It feels like banging my head off a brick wall.

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The CIA cannot find any firm evidence to suggest that Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons - as opposed to just nuclear power to which they are perfectly entitled.

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In that, they agree with every statement the International Atomic Energy Authority has ever made on the issue - including recent ones about some enriched material found, which isn't enriched enough for weapons useage and can be perfectly well explained by civilian experimentation.

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But that won't stop folks like Dick Cheney or George Bush. They continue to follow the rhetoric of war.

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Their jaw-jaw for war-war still has it's deliberately myopic cheerleaders too. The neocon American Enterprise Institute's Joshua Muravchik is clear - Bomb Iran. To stop a non-existant threat.

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So does Jules Crittenden, the nutcase neocon columnist for the Boston Herald. Jules even manages to develop the entire deranged exceptionalist egotism of the neocons into one clear paragraph.

It doesn't matter. Here's the deal with Saddam. It holds for the Iranians, too. It's a gun-toting American Wild West cowboy thing. You know how us Americans are. We're crazy like that. When someone who is irrational, with a bad history, in a position to cause trouble, starts putting out that he is arming up and intends to destroy you or make you kneel down before him, you can start making assumptions. You can also start acting on them.

Without ever considering for even a microsecond that other nations might feel the same way about American neocon-led irrational, troublemaking, arms-building war-drum banging ways.

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And all of these people, so eager to have Americans spill other people's blood for them, can talk about all this as if the situation in Iraq, where the U.S. military is fresh out of new options, is happening in a different dimension, rather than right next door in a nation where Iran's fellow Shiites have the capacity to make their stay there akin to the British Army's retreat from Afghanistan.

So tell me, are we doing any good?