Back on October 25, some left-wing wacko nutjob posted a diary with this overamped headline:
We need a pre-emptive strike against Iran - RIGHT NOW
All that was missing was "BREAKING!"
In the piece, the diarist expressed a laughable sense of alarm about a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf. His irrational fear was - get this - that the White House would go so far as to stage a "Tonkin Gulf-like" incident in the Persian Gulf, attacking Iran just before the midterm elections in order to affect the outcome of those elections!
COO-koo! COO-koo!
(Also available at My Left Wing)
Here's some of what he wrote about that silly, ill-considered fear (overheated emphasis in original):
The White House is this close to starting a shooting war with Iran, no doubt to be based on some flimsy pretext.
Fortunately, the diary was hooted down by many commenters as needlessly alarmist, unfounded and generally encroaching into conspiracy-theory territory. It did not, thank God for the reputation of this site, make the Recommended list.
And rightly so. Because, in his fever-dream panic, the diarist made one critical error in the logical foundation of his arguments: His frantic urgency (!!!) was due to the fact that
he assumed that the White House had a shred of respect for the power of Congress, and therefore for the outcome of the Congressional elections.
What an idiot.
If the diarist had been paying any attention during the previous five years, he would immediately have understood that the White House didn't give a rat's ass about anything Congress had to say about anything, or even what it did about anything - so there was no reason to believe the administration would go out of its way to disrupt the Congressional elections. Regardless of the makeup of Congress, the White House had been and would continue doing whatever it damn pleased.
Nothing that has happened in the intervening 10 weeks since the diary was published would give one any reason to think that has changed.
In fact, what has happened in the intervening 10 weeks has only served to blow out of the water the diarist's other assertion. The diarist was wrong not only in his assumptions about the White House's motivations for wanting to strike Iran, and, therefore, the urgency of their desire - he also was (as subsequent events have amply demonstrated) dead wrong about his proposed method of helping put a stop to it. Here's what he wrote (again, overcaffeinated emphases in original):
We have to head this off at the pass. We have to, as it were, blow this out of the water. Forget just neutralizing the potential effectiveness of this as a campaign tool - we must actually put a halt to the administration's insane plan that has been in the works for months, if not years.
And there just might be a way to do that.
The diarist pointed out that a cooked-up "incident" in the Persian Gulf would look exactly like the cooked-up Tonkin Gulf "incident" of 1964 that had triggered the rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. Taken with everything else that had transpired regarding the conduct of American involvement in Iraq, it was impossible to deny the remarkable similarities between the quagmire in Southeast Asia back then and the quagmire in the Middle East now.
Iraq = Vietnam, the diarist argued, was a meme that, if thrust before the public relentlessly, would stop the madness.
The diarist believed that even the BushCheney administration would not be so foolish as to repeat
Every.
Single.
Mistake
committed by the United States during its awful, bloody, ill-advised, frequently illegal, unpopular, immoral, ill-founded, poorly executed, expensive, prestige-crippling Longest War Ever And First War Lost, or at the very least, that it would not want attention called to the fact that it had, in fact, repeated
Every.
Single.
Mistake
from that disastrous conflict.
The diarist argued that, by calling attention to the fact that the administration was repeating the missteps followed by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War, the American people and Congressional leaders would generate such an outcry that the administration would have no choice but to rethink its plans in the face of such withering public and political disapprobation.
And, once again, as we have seen, the diarist utterly miscalculated. Not only does the BushCheney administration not give a rat's ass about what Congress does, it cares not one whit what Congress, the American public or even - just for good measure - the highest levels of the United States military says or thinks about its conduct of military operations.
Or anything else, for that matter. Any criticism is, after all, just words. Blah, blah, blah.
"Vietnam"? Feh.
Does the word, "Cambodia" ring a bell?
How 'bout, "Fiasco"? "Insanity"? "Bloodbath"? "Nuclear holocaust"?
All words that carry absolutely no weight with the members of the current administration.
Here's one final word:
Impeachment.
Only time will tell whether that word will carry any weight with this administration.
But in the meantime, I'm not - er, ah, AHEM! - the diarist is not gonna get all worked up about it.