Spencer Ackerman has it on very good authority that Cheney's put out the word to right-wing think tanks to start selling a war with Iran. Ackerman's source is solid, as is the reasoning he offers:
How would an actual war be launched, given the expected opposition of the Democratic-controlled Congress? To that end, President Bush's decision to declare Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group provides an opportunity. If the IRGC, Iran's alternate military, is a terrorist group, Bush could claim authority under the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan to take action against Iran without Congressional approval, citing the AUMF's broad provision that "the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States." (It's a stretch, but the administration has already made the more-tendentious argument that the AUMF authorized the warrantless surveillance program.) "The AUMF applies, according to the Cheney-Addington view of the Constitution," says Rubin.
Not only does this make a good bit of sense, it also explains what previously seemed to be an inexplicable decision. That said, I just don't see this working. Ackerman's source speculates that the target of Cheney's marketing campaign is really the Pentagon. As we've heard on several occasions in the past, members of the Joint Chiefs have threatened to resign should the order come down to begin a third war. And even Republican congressmen have suggested that impeachment would have to be considered should a new, unauthorized war come to pass. Now I don't put much faith in the later, but the former strikes me as pretty good bet.
All that aside, I think Josh Marshall really sums the whole mess up nicely with this:
It's like handing a drunk the keys to yet another car. Where he says he's going is really beside the point.
And this:
As the agitprop engines start churning again, it is worth stepping back and considering an undeniable fact. Iran is not a rival power to the United States. The idea that Iran is a threat to the United States in conventional military terms is laughable. A terrorist threat? Sure. But that's a very different kind of threat.
Another point: Iranian meddling in Iraq. Some points are so obvious that to state them seems almost redundant. But what exactly are we doing? This isn't to put our efforts in Iraq and Iran's on equal terms. The mullah's regime in Iran is brutish, illiberal and thuggish (though the comparison was a bit more helpful before Dick Cheney was our poster-boy of the rule-of-law, western civilization and democratic values). Like most people I put intervention based on my ideals on a different footing with that of those whose ideals I don't agree with. But to say that Iran -- which has deep historical and religious ties to Iraq and is ... well, right there -- is meddling while we've been occupying and running the country for four years is just silly. You may say that these are just aggressive ways of phrasing the issue and these fact are all known. So what's the difference? But the slow build up of lies and misdirections, over time, affects our thinking and our ability to reason at all coherently.
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