Like War? Plenty of Candidates Will Be Happy to Give It To You

Events move faster than we can comment on them. I just finished posting a discussion about the Mideast in which I warned:


Americans will tend to blame Moslems for any ratcheting up of tension by the Administration, locking the next administration into an extension of the war policy, which would go far to solidifying all the dangerous Bush policy innovations (nuclear war threats as normal policy options, claims that preventive war is a morally legitimate form of behavior even in the absence of an immediate and unavoidable threat, the way to deal with the Moslem world is by force, the solution to the oil crisis is to take control of other people’s oil resources).


Already, the U.S. has taken two steps in precisely that direction. First came the sad, desperate bid by Hillary to scrape a few votes out of the gutter by tearing a page out of the playbooks of the likes of Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu. (For a pointed critique of Hillary's dangerous bluster, check out The Nation.) And second, it apparently worked. Iranians, Israelis, and Americans all seem to vote for bullies.