I shudder that we never learned the lessons of Vietnam, or learned the wrong ones, but the fact that we appear not to have learned the lessons of Iraq (or learned the wrong ones) is enough to make a strong person weep.

The super secret war against Iran. Which either has been going on super secretly for the last 3 years or is guaranteed to start tomorrow morning 8am sharp. I swear it's true. Bet the farm, it's a lock.

in Gaza and other places in the Midest which break down to Sunni & Shiite. Prbably the best way to unite both of these groups-an even bigger threat to Israel-would be to bomb Iran.

I've always thought that the word "terrorist" should be defined as anyone who has committed an act of terrorism or anyone who plans on committing an act of terrorism in the future. It's seems perfectly reasonable and it encompasses thousands of dangerous people. Unfortunatetly now "terrorist" has been redefined to include anybody who doesn't like the USA plus anybody who happens to occupy any real estate we're targeting at the moment. So we've instantly gone from facing thousands of terrorists to facing millions! No wonder the chickhawks are so scared!

What you've described in your post, is the redefinition of the word "insurgent" in precisely the same manner. It does make things more difficult when insurgents are routinely elected in the Democracies we're so busy imposing. But nevertheless in this Orwellian world we now occupy, "insurgencies" are bound to be springing up all over the place. All we have to do is target a building and "POOF", its instantly filled with insurgents!

To employ some of Rummy's quaint phraseology, there is no question but that Iran must be bombed, and it isn't at all necessary to provide any factual justification. You see, if we bomb Iran it will occupy the Main Stream Media, and this news will perhaps provoke a huge outcry that will last for a few days, and then by that time Paris will have completed her sentence, and Scooter will begin his, so the collapse of our military misadenture in Iraq--that's Iraq, not Iran--will hardly cause a ripple. Karl has spoken.

Except that there really are constructs of laws. For instance in Lebanon, Gaza and such the relevant parties put pen to paper and 'promised' not to import free weapons from Iran. If all those agreements are just incidental silliness then let's not have them and allow whomever to arm whomever whenever it likes and the hell with treaties. Which I guess I'm ok with as long as everyone else is. In short if there's no notion of rule of law that actually means anything, and since at the end of the day all international agreements are voluntary and not enforceable perhaps we should simply abandon the idea that negotiations and agreements mean anything at all.

In short if there's no notion of rule of law that actually means anything, and since at the end of the day all international agreements are voluntary and not enforceable perhaps we should simply abandon the idea that negotiations and agreements mean anything at all.

You've just decribed the Bush/Cheney philosophy in its entirety in a single sentence.

Hopefully the outcome of the internal struggle in the White House will see Cheney and his neocon pals defeated. But CNN this morning led with the unattributed claims by US government officials that Iran is now arming the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Shiites, in an unprecedented offensive, presumably against the US. In other words, the new story line appears to be that they are engaged in war against us through their proxies, making it easy to justify a military response from us.

It's all a regurgitation of right-wing talking points with only one caveat that Gates says it can't be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. This fig leaf is small comfort. TV journalism appears to be enabling upcoming military action just as they enabled the invasion in Iraq.

Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason," explains why this insane policy of attacking Iran may actually occur without any real debate. It's all PR, manipulation and sound bites now. Print media is dead; images on tv are designed to illicit primitive emotions -- fear, anger, dread -- not reason and logic.

By any metric you choose, the idea of attacking Iran is insane. Yet this is going forward without public debate. Yes, the alignment of the religious right, oil interests, the Israeli lobby are formidable. But the fact that there is no debate, and there almost certainly will not be one, is due to the decline of reason and thoughtful deliberation in the public sphere.

Read the book. It's all there and needs to be read by anyone who wants to work for change before it's too late.

I do vaguely remember that Iran & co. is a real, functioning country that asserts that it has the right to enter into agreements with other countries which are subject to some level of transparency. What would be the point of hiding the fact that shiploads of their weapons are routinely intercepted if they didn't worry about what the consequences of that are? According to your thread of reasoning we should abandon the idea and the process through which states and state-like actors officially, diplomatically deal with one another. Whatever you can get away with, you should. Does that work for you?

One of the early bellwethers for a war that is certain, though not yet declared, appears to be small munitions manufacturing.

In the year before the First Gulf War, I heard a program on NPR that included an opinion piece on Saddam Hussein and a brief interview with a day worker in a small munitions plant. They asked the woman if she thought there would be a war with Iraq and she said, definitely. She had no doubt of it. When they asked how she knew, she said they always make a lot of bullets before they go to war. She was insistent, saying that she had worked that job all the way back to Vietnam and that it was always the case that increased munitions manufacture always preceded any media discussion of major military action. She was asked if they had ever made a lot of bullets and that had not happened. Her answer was, no.

It was fascinating to me, because it reminded me exactly of standard corporate product strategy. To my mind, that is what the Times article is about -- product strategy. The product? War.

The fact that John Bolton and Norman Podhoretz are even mentioned by name in that article says it all.

We will go to war with Iran. The decision has already been made.