How can I, from the comfort of my first-world home in America or Europe, help the people of Iran... using only my computer?

Speaking of the internet, we westerners sure do want to play with other people's lives by fucking with their internet.

img src = TBP, clicking takes one to Anonymous Iran.

Wingnut funtime

Because I was out of icepicks I watched Hardball last night. Tom DeLay was on to argue that:

(1) George Bush has done terrible damage to the GOP brand, so much so that a Democrat is likely to win the White House.

(2) Iran's missile tests show that Iran is determined to continue its nuclear program.

(3) If we don't go to war with Iran, then Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.

(4) We cannot allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

(5) Thus, we must go to war with Iran.

(6) But we can't trust a Democratic President to start a new war.

(7) Hence, we need to get the war started before November.

When pressed, the only specific hostile act DeLay was willing to explicitly endorse was a blockade. I'd say that's scary enough.

Just because you're paranoid...

The White House hawks in Dick Cheney's office and elsewhere who want to stage an attack on Iran are clearly winning the internal power stuggle. And an often overlooked sub-plot on the long road toward war with Tehran is this: How could Bush stage an attack on Iran without the authorization of a skeptical, Democratic Congress?

Today, the White House has solved that pesky problem in one fell swoop. By explicitly linking the Iranian elite guard into the post 9/11 "global war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's lawyers would certainly now argue that any military strike on Iran is now covered by the October 2002 authorization to use military force in Iraq, as part of their overly sweeping response to the 2001 attacks. |Attytood|

(via)

One small comment. When the Bush Administration does something that's stupid on the surface (as in declaring Shia Iran to be allied with Sunni Al Quaeda), it's tempting to just mark it up to their transcendant unrealism. It's important to remember, though, that these idiots are very, very clever when it comes to finding means to accomplish fundamentally stupid ends.

Get your war on

On the BBC news hour this morning a reporter asserted, completely without evidence, that Iran has been supplying the Taliban with fancy new shaped munitions roadside bombs for use against British and American forces in Afghanistan. It's possible, I guess, though last I heard Iran was in the hands of the Shia, the Taliban were a bunch of crazy ass Sunnis, and the two didn't get along very well.

At any rate, would it be too much to ask that these sorts of charges be backed by a significant body of evidence before being publicly aired? I seem to recall that playing fast and loose with the facts can lead to popular support for unprovoked wars of aggression.

Also, if I were Iran's head mullah in charge of manufacturing shaped munitions roadside bombs I wouldn't export. I'd stockpile.

What's wrong with this argument?

Spencer Ackerman reports that, while drunk, he found no effective response to the following justification for the coming war with Iran:

It's not us declaring war on them. They have declared war on us. They attack our troops. Your position amounts to requiring soldiers in a firefight to check the nationalities of their assailants before returning fire; and so you have reached absurdity.

While blogging and, presumably, sober Ackerman notes that the argument is disingenuous. That is, the real reason for war with Iran has less to do with Iran's supposed machinations in Iraq than with the Bush Administration's broader strategic, uh, vision.

Be that as it may, it's still worth figuring out how to answer the argument above. Here are a couple of points:

• Although the idea of declaring war may by now have become a quaint anachronism, there does seem to be a difference between beligerant acts and declarations of war.
  
• As beligerant acts go, supplying an armed insurgency is less beligerant than, say, the attacking Pearl Harbor or assassinating a spare duke.
  
• It's far from obvious that these beligerant acts justify an escalation to wholesale war. Which is to say that there's a difference between returning fire in a firefight and bombing the bejesus out of a large nation.
  
• Wars are really outrageously bad, and are worth avoiding even when justified. Or, as Jesus and Woody Guthrie^[1] put it, there's a better world awaiting for the meek.

----------
1 Though I hasten to add that my own acquaintance with this chestnut derives, sadly, from Kenny Rogers.

Speaking of the Iranian threat

CNN.com has an article up right now with the breathless headline Iran role suspected in brazen Iraq attack. Without getting into a discussion of the claims made about Iranian influence, here's a catalog of the sources cited:

• "two officials from separate U.S. government agencies"

Done and done.

Addendum: Ogged has a more effective post making similar points.

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, encoded in a sudoku, transcribed in a crossword

The other day I heard that, as of December, the US changed its policy toward Iranian agents encountered in Iraq. According to the report, the former policy had been 'catch and release' and the new policy is 'kill or capture'.

What? Until December of 2006 the US military's policy toward foreign agents found in Iraq was catch and release?! I'm pretty much a pacifist, and even I think those tactics sound irresponsibly naive. On the other hand, what does kill or capture mean? Are we talking about combat or summary executions? And, are we talking about limited term detention or are we talking about eternal confinement with some torture thrown in? And why, if the policy changed in December, is the Bush Administration crowing about it now?

Actually, the last question has a pretty simple answer. The Bush Administration is crowing about the new policy now because they're making a show of escalating the tension between the US and Iran.

That itself, though, is pretty strange. Leaving aside the fact that war with Iran would be a really bad idea, how does escalating the rhetoric against Iran and its religious fundamentalists square with a surge strategy in Iraq that basically amounts to the US taking the side of the Shia against the Sunni in Baghdad? Which is to say that there's something bizarre about the US simultaneously (a) turning up the heat against Iran, and (b) taking the side of Iran's Iraqi allies in the burgeoning Iraqi Civil War.

One possible answer to this puzzle, and the one I had pretty much resigned myself to accepting, is that the US powers that be still don't understand basic facts about the religious and sectarian divisions in that part of the world, and that this thoroughgoing ignorance has led to a massively incoherent policy.

This morning, though, I'm entertaining the possibility that what's going on is stupidity of an entirely different order. That is, I'm thinking that we're seeing the Clintonian political formula of triangulation applied as actual real military strategy. It goes like this. The US wants to be the dominant political actor in Iraq. To accomplish this, we have to disentangle the Shia from Iran, which means we must wage a serious campaign against Iranian influence. On its own, though, such a campaign wouldn't accomplish our goals because it would inevitably anger the Shiite majority -- in fact, we'll have to take on some Shiite militias in the name of freeing the rest of the Shia from foreign influence. Thus, we must triangulate by striking out against some group that's opposed to the Shia. Since we aren't going to strike out at ourselves or the Kurds, that leaves the Sunni. Sucks to be them.