Well that’s Peter Galbraith’s argument in the NYRB article I link to above.

“Even though they can’t accomplish it, the Bush administration leaders have been unwilling to abandon regime change as a goal. Its advocates compare their efforts to the support the US gave democrats behind the Iron Curtain over many decades. But there is a crucial difference. The Soviet and East European dissidents wanted US support, which was sometimes personally costly but politically welcome. But this is immaterial to administration ideologues. They are, to borrow Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, deeply committed to policies that feel good rather than do good. If Congress wants to help the Iranian opposition, it should cut off funding for Iranian democracy programs. ”

So we can’t rely on the idea that because its counter productive they won’t do it. Damn. Fool me, thinking that common sense would win through.

http://mondediplo.com/2007/10/04empire

‘For the US power elite, being on top of the world has been a habit for 60 years. Hegemony has been a way of life; empire, a state of being and of mind. The institutional realist critics of the Bush administration have no alternative conceptual framework for international relations, based on something other than force, the balance of power or strategic predominance.’

Note that he’s talking about the ‘realists’, and not the likes of Dick Cheney (who gets his Middle East policy ideas from Bernard Lewis) or the semi-moronic Bush (the translated transcript of his meeting with Aznar, published recently in El País, shows him to be a vain and sanctimonious war pig): those who currently hold sway in Washington. The latter are probably smart enough to grasp the concept of American decline, but may be incapable of realising that the best way of dealing with this is not by attempting to re-establish dominance through, among other things, bombing Iran.

I was trying to suggest this when I said “However fun it might be, in a weird way, to paint apocalyptic scenarios such as the use of unconventional weapons in a global guerilla war, the reality might be different.” There was a the hope almost, that they bloody well do it, just so it really blows up in their faces.

So much of this talk of war is strategic, although the Hersh article and other sources do suggest that more plans are afoot. My point though, was it didn’t make sense, as you point out. There can be no real advantage - so why is talk still so virulent?

But what sort of intervention is planned and/or likely? Almost certainly nothing that would incorporate footfall of troops. With the mess in Iraq there is simply no way the US public will countenance that. Which leaves targeted strikes, perhaps by Israel. But even that would be utterly cosmetic in military terms. And I don’t know if they’d bother taking the risk for something that would like as not fail in its intended objective.

Then Milne essentially ignored Tehran’s own imperial pretensions, waving them away with a couple of comments. But the reality is that Iran is a regional power and keen to extend that power (and has a remarkable network of proxies) and Milnes rather tepid linking of it with Chavez et al seems a bit thin, a sort of “let’s hope that they’re all radicals really”. Well maybe, but I’m a tad sceptical about that. I don’t blame Iran for that in the same way that I don’t blame China for extending its influence, that’s what big fairly powerful states do, but consequently that requires an even gaze of their motives and actions (and that is a thread which runs through Iranian geopolitical thinking quite separate from the character of individual governments whether of ‘moderate’ or ‘fundamentalist’ stripe).

Having said all that I agree with Milne that any attack would merely strengthen an already embattled and quite weird Iranian regime. Interesting too to counterpose that article with a previous one - I think in the Observer last weekend - which showed how the regime was cracking down hard on dissent, etc…

There is so much of The Second Coming that has entered the language though.

Things fall apart; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed; The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. And even ‘Slouches towards Bethlehem’.

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleading on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.