It looks like the usual warmongers want a mulligan:
Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.
Some policy makers have accused intelligence agencies of playing down Iran’s role in Hezbollah’s recent attacks against Israel and overestimating the time it would take for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.
The complaints, expressed privately in recent weeks, surfaced in a Congressional report about Iran released Wednesday. They echo the tensions that divided the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency during the prelude to the war in Iraq.
To me the worry about striking Iran seems pointless. We don’t have the army for regime change, but simply bombing them will accomplish less than nothing. Iran’s regime will emerge stronger than before, we will hastily abandon Iraq (assuming that the inflamed shiite mob allows us to do so) and no ally in the world will join a second American expedition to attack a middle eastern country unprovoked. Needless to say Israel will face hell on Earth.
So why the hullaballoo? Think about why the latest Ford Mustang looks almost exactly like a car they made thirty years ago. Once upon a time gasoline cost less than a dollar a gallon, American carmakers dominated the inferior Japanese products and the Ford/Chevy/Dodge muscle car stood near the zenith of pop-culture cool. These days it seems like Ford can’t buy a break and you can hardly blame them for trying to get some of that old mojo back. To be clear, you can blame them for chasing their glory by slavishly copying the past rather than investing in forward-looking products and higher production quality, but the sentiment itself one can perfectly understand.
Similarly I suspect that today’s derelict crop of Republicans look back at those glorious 2002 midterms when they could steamroll anybody as accomodationist, soft-on-terror Saddam-loving and worse and they wonder where their mojo went. It seems unlikely that most of these folks have low enough wattage to believe that we have a workable military option with Iran, even keeping in mind that in today’s DC the cynics win practically every bet. I suppose that it depends on how low your opinion of these people has become, but I suspect that our current leaders understand that they need war talk right now a lot more than they need an actual war.
Some think that Iraq will heat up as a midterm issue. I don’t buy it. Despite the bluster the GOP knows that even the base is ready for a change, otherwise the idiotic stay the course! would never have morphed into the inane adapt and win!. Absent any other issue to rally the base this November the GOP needs to dangle the possibility of an immaculate war that hasn’t started yet, and which most likely never will.