This gives you options when the threat comes to pass. If it looks a really convincing threat, you can say that you didn’t of course mean this particular threat, which is a real one which could not be foreseen and (grave and statesmanlike look on face) you support the President 100% in this hour of peril. If, as is much more likely, it looks fake and exaggerated to anyone with clear vision it will be much easier to make the punters see what’s in front of their eyes by referring back to this obscure speech.

Erstwhile has a very good point here. Get a government that’s surviving on short-term benefits, and it might very well attack iran.

Now consider the intelligence people are saying iran is 10 years from a bomb. If we stage a little attack and hit a few sites that don’t actually do that much damage, Bush can claim that we set back iran’s nuclear ambitions by 10 years.

A whole lot of uproar, not much actual attack. Then we quit. Would iran keep responding? Stir up trouble that we’d respond to, start a real war? I dunno. If they don’t, it’s a great photo-op of a war for Bush. A clean easy propaganda victory.

A few months ago I was seeing various estimates that the attack was scheduled for late March. Now John Emerson suggests something vaguer that might imply an attack in July/August. When would be the best time for US domestic purposes, like the elections? What international considerations would require it come sooner or later?

Has anybody heard recent rumors about when it’s actually scheduled?

Is Bush one of them? I don’t know, and neither does he. I doubt that he thinks of them as suicidal lunatics, though; he seems quite respectful of them.
Before the folks whitewashed whitehouse.gov, I used to have a link to a speech bush gave in his first term to some fundies where he bragged that when the rapture comes, the whitehouse will be “unmanned.”

I suspect that the real reason that North Korea is allowed to have nukes isn’t that they lack oil, it is more that there is exactly no mention of NK in the bible. But Babylon (in what is now called Iraq) gets lots of mention in the bible.

The rapturists reject that dirty resurrection bit from the bible: they want to be whisked up to heaven straight away. Avoiding the messy bit of dieing. That’s why left behind is such a popular series of books among the rapturists. Mr Clark, over at Slacktivist, does a good job of deconstructing just what nonsense is going on in left behind.

I think that Assad is better off thanks to the invasion. He clearly has something to bargain with now (making life easy/hard for Baathist exiles/foreign jihadis). And foreign threats of invasion always shore up an incumbent government even if (as Assad has surely realised by now) there’s very little chance that they will be followed up.

Right! The Islamic masses are currently blaming the government of the U.S.A. for a private newspaper in Denmark having printed cartoons which offended their princess-and-the-pea-sensitive sensibilities. But here you imagine they aren’t going to blame the U.S.A. when Israel, recipient of several billion dollars every year in U.S. military subsidies, launches a massive bombing campaign in Iran, incidentally wiping out thousands of Iranian civilians – no, certainly the sensible, level-headed Moslems will say, “Hey, now, let’s not get irrational; those were Israeli F-16s that blew up and/or irradiated my co-religionists; why in Heaven should we be upset with those nice Americans?”

The U.S. occupation has stunted Iraq economically—as imperialists normally do stunt the colonial peripheries they deign to occupy. Surely among the great benefits that will accrue to Iraq when the U.S. leaves will be resuming its old economic policies, which were, pre-80s, extremely successful. Who knows, someday the Iraqis might even get back the petty cash—the 8 billion or so – the Americans stole from them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1714607,00.html

Not really, but the Christian Armageddonists come pretty close. They really are hoping for the world to come to an end.

Is Bush one of them? I don’t know, and neither does he. I doubt that he thinks of them as suicidal lunatics, though; he seems quite respectful of them.

Bush doesn’t know that, though.

“the occupation of Iraq has strengthened the position of every anti-American government in the region”

Like who? Iran, yes. Syria? Doesn’t seem like it. What other “anti-American governments” are there?

“the US has deprived itself of any practical option of using military force to stop Iran developing real nuclear weapons”

Do you say this is a bad thing?