Out with the Q, in with the N, second verse, same as the first...

Through willful neglect and misadventures elsewhere, as well as a failure to support pro-democracy groups inside the country when they had a nominally reformist President and not a lunatic, we are on the brink of a crisis with Iran. The lack of intrenational support for former President Mohammed Khatami indirectly led to hardliner Mahmous Ahmadinejad's election. By not participating in European talks with Tehran about their nuclear program, we doomed them to failure. There's simply no way Iran could agree to any terms of disarmament without assurances from the United States, which couldn't come to them without our participation.

So we helped set this in motion. Iran has a nuclear program, one that is pretty ambitious and robust. They have a leader who denies the Holocaust and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. And they have very strong ties to the Shiite majority in Iraq, having signed security deals and forged a kinship that gives Tehran an upper hand in the Muslim world.

But that really doesn't matter at this point, since the situation has come to a head. Iran is producing nuclear energy (at the very least) and has broken off talks with the EU. The difference is that the major countries of the globe, including Russia, appear to be in concert with US policy, decreasing the possiblity of unilateral action... maybe. It's important to remember that the notion of Iraq as a gathering crisis point grew over a matter of a year and a half until it became an inevitability. Military action seems far-flung now, but maybe not by next year at this time. In the interim, I'm sure the neocon hawks will agitate and fearmonger their way into arguing to do something. Now, this time the agitation is a little more justified; but that doesn't make it a wholly rational course of action, especially for the current gang in charge to handle. I wholeheartedly agree with Josh Marshall when he says this:

During the two years before 9/11 and March 2003, there was a group of commentators (I'd include myself among them) who bought into the basic argument about the danger posed by the Iraqi regime (though not the extremity of it), were willing, at a minimum, to put military force on the table as a means of resolving the problem, were perhaps willing to go as far as supporting an invasion, but were adamant critics of administration policy in the Middle East.

Looking back on that debate, what didn't make sense about 'my' position was that folks like myself were debating Iraq policy in the abstract. How would I deal with Iraq if I were president? What would be the sensible approach if we had a president and foreign policy team which we thought was acting in good faith and competent at handling the issue.

The problem was that there was no Iraq policy in the abstract. That was just a fantasy. There was Iraq in 2002 and 2003 with President Bush et al. calling the shots. Any discussion of the issue which didn't take those key facts into account was just a parlor game, no more than words. What's more, the existence of a cadre of commentators from the political opposition who espoused a policy that looked a lot like the president's actually gave him a great deal of cover. It made his policies look more reasonable. It greased the skids for its implementation.

So with Iran.

The prospect of a nuclearized Iran seems far more perilous to me than anything we faced or seemed likely to face with Iraq. But for those of us trying to think through how to deal with this situation, we have to start from the premise that there is no Iran Question, or whatever you want to call it. There's only how to deal with Iran with this administration in place.

Do you trust this White House's good faith, priorities or competence in dealing with this situation?

No, I don't. I didn't even give the Administration the latitude on Iraq that Josh did. All I saw was a group of vague, hazy, half-assed intelligence ideas, and then suddenly policy advisers were on C-SPAN saying things like "It'll take so-and-so amount of troops to take Saddam out." I don't think there ever was a real debate, and certainly those liberal hawks provided major cover for the President to implement his pre-emptive policy.

Now we need to make sure debate on Iran springs from a starting position of reality. The group that went to war in Iraq - without enough troops, the ones that disbanded the Army, allowed mass looting, didn't get serious about reconstruction or training for years, fostered conditions for an insurgency to take hold, plundered Congressional appropriations for billions - THAT'S the group that'd be going to war in Iran, a more powerful and more dangerous opponent. Do you really want that to happen?