Thanks for filling in the details there. Electro Spambot probably thinks SAVAK is/was the greatest invention since sliced bread, though.....

Cheers,

It was the most ridiculous article Friedman has ever written, and by God he's written a few (ridiculous articles, that is). Let's just be happy he's predicting a cold war. That is, a war in which both sides are afraid to strike at each other directly, until in the end, one of the two (guess which) collapses from military overspend, failed invasions and domestic discontent.

Iran should be all right under this scenario. In fact, they can just pretend the US doesn't exist even as the Friedman's of this world hide from the bogeyman under their beds.

Glenn -- How about explaining why you failed to include the following quotation from Friedman's column:

"We’re not going to war with Iran, nor should we."

Are these the words of a war-mongerer?

Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.

___________________________________

I could be wrong, but this scenario is pre-Sopranos. My guess is that it was inspired by the memorable scene in “The Untouchables”, where Al Capone (Robert DeNiro) presides at a banquet where a known enemy is an invited guest. Capone makes a little after dinner speech, picking up a baseball bat in the process, and remarks how much he enjoys baseball as he begins to circle the table.

When Capone reaches the chair in which his enemy is sitting, he suddenly and viciously fatally clubs him with the bat.

This is the kind of testosterone-soaked violent fantasy that neocons savor– the wealthier and more effete they are, the likelier they are to fetishize about ruthless brute force in the service of “Good” against "Evil".

Put another way, since they believe that their goals (ends) are right and just, it’s perfectly OK to behave like a brutal monster/gangster to accomplish such ends. And, like most career violent criminals, they never see the error of their ways.

The idea that a cold war could even exist between the United States and Iran is laughable.

The idea of a war of any sort, cold or hot or otherwise, is that two sides are implacably and more or less evenly opposed to one another over common but contested interests of some kind.

Iran is a regional power, at best, and only because the actions of Israel and now the United States within that region have leveraged Iran's position from a weak one to a strong one. You don't need to have the best hand to win at cards if the other guys at the table are playing like drunken idiots.

The United States is the global power, or at worst a global power and even then only because of the same aforementioned stupid decisions. There is little that Iran can do to thwart American goals or interfere with American plans in any meaningful way.

It's certainly believable that Iran could end up in a cold war with Israel, another regional power that shares many overlapping spheres of influence with Iran and has a lot to quarrel over.

But nothing will diminish American prestige and power in the world faster than playing up some kind of junior varsity competition with a third-tier state.

Thomas Friedman should be ignored — not by Glenn Greenwald but by everyone else who listens so attentively to him.

IS A SCUMBAG!

And now Friedman has shifted his phallic, warmongering eyes from Iraq to Iran.

Phallic eyes? What are you talking about? You'd be a half-decent commentator if you dropped all the silly, poorly written ad hominem attacks on anyone and everyone to the right of Ted Kennedy.

And we could start by, I don't know, actually declaring war

I think we could start by identifying an actual threat, assessing the alternatives for dealing with it, having an actual public debate over said alternatives that doesn't include shouting the other side down or an orchestrated farce of 'leaks' about tactical battle plans (to narrow the focus of debate), then a debate in congress and finally a vote on thet thar declaration, but hey, that's just another one of those quaint 'laws' we used to live by, pre-9/11.

You make a good point about our war 'policy', I think. Did you read the NSS that first included mention of 'preventive' war? It sounded so reasonable, you had to actually read it again and again and say, wait, what are these guys trying to say ... ?

And you could read it a thousand times without ever anticipating Cheney's 'one percent doctrine', if you were a reasonable person. Another quaint idea ...

Huhuh. That scene in 'The Untouchables' gave me wood. Nhuhuhuh.

Glenn -- How about explaining why you failed to include the following quotation from Friedman's column:

"We’re not going to war with Iran, nor should we."

Are these the words of a war-mongerer?

Yes. It's a COLD WAR Friedman wants. Did you miss that?

Glenn -- How about explaining why you failed to include the following quotation from Friedman's column:

"We’re not going to war with Iran, nor should we."

Another person who can't read. From the post:

While he denies in passing that he wants to wage actual war on Iran, he says we must find incentives "that the other side finds too tempting or frightening to ignore."

Did you miss that or just not comprehend it?

Are these the words of a war-mongerer?

George Bush said he tried to avoid war with Iraq and that he doesn't believe in torture. So I guess that settles that. Hey - he said it, so that's conclusive. No need to look at anything else he said or did on the topic.

Oh my. Deep into it tonight. If no one else is going to pick up on this, you know I will. larry, dfh wrote:

With newspapers all over the country cutting back on news staff, why would a publisher pay for an effetist know-nothing [Friedman] with an infinite travel budget if the CIA weren't kicking in?

Operation Mockingbird was the CIA's 30-year, highly successful program to hire and use U.S. journalists as CIA assets. As Deep Throat told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth 20 agents." At its height, Alex Constantine reports the CIA had 3,000 journalists on its payroll. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Talk:Operation_Mockingbird

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

According to researchers Steve Kangas, Angus Mackenzie and Alex Constantine, Operation Mockingbird was not closed down by the CIA in 1976. For example, in 1998 Kangas argued that CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife ran "Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world."

http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html

Less than a year after he wrote that, on February 8, 1999, Kangas was found dead in the bathroom of the Pittsburgh offices of Richard Mellon Scaife. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked:

"Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?

Better leave it there and make sure my anonymizer proxy is on.