On to Iran

Niall Ferguson, the "serious" Right's favorite historian, channels the future in this column in Britain's Observer:

The optimists argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis would replay itself in the Middle East. Both sides would threaten war - and then both sides would blink. That was Secretary Rice's hope - indeed, her prayer - as she shuttled between the capitals. But it was not to be.

The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.

His thesis: since Sharon was the only man who would have supported Bush's honorable instinct for preemptive strikes against Iran - Blair hamstrung in Britain by the Iraq backlash, Condi Rice a diplomatic weenie - a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran happens because Bush didn't take out Iran's nuclear capability before it reached attack capacity.

Not to be seen in the column is an admission that Bush's invasion of Iraq strengthened Iran as a military power, paved the path for the elevation of Irani warmonger to power, weakened America's stance as military power to be avoided, united disparate branches of the Islamic world into a cohesive and militant anti-Americanism, and emboldened sundry and every country, friend and foe, to regard the United States as a bully at a poker table, bluffing with a two and a seven in the hole.

Well, all in that last sentence must be the anti-war Liberals' fault. (And let me here add: it's amazing how tough guys create the very situations of weakness that call for the intervention of tough guys, yes?) Nevertheless, let's compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, Iran to post-Rhineland Third Reich, warm-up the strike jets, and bomb. Bomb. Bomb. And just wait until the anti-Iran rhetoric in the SOTU speech.