Here is Krauthammer's take on Obama's engagement with Iran:

"You go the extra mile so that you're in position to do stuff afterward. Will he do stuff afterward? I doubt it."

So, if he loses, I wonder if Ahmadinejad will follow Osama bin Whatshisname down the memory hole? Wasn't OBL the biggest threat in the world to these guys until they plugged Ahmadinejad into that role?

We all should be worried. If Iran elects a "moderate" as president, stops the spouting off about how they are the meanest kids on the block, and tries to live with the rest of the world, chaos will ensue. American armaments industries will be without a way to maintain their bloated profits. Dozens of their executives will have to find a way to live on less than a 7 figure annual salary. And, there will be far fewer lucrative, no work jobs for ex Generals and Congressmen. Can our country ever survive such a catastrophe?

The Islamophobic doctrine that the entire Muslim Middle East is just one undifferentiated race of mad suicide bombers, who don't respect life "the way we do", who don't respect the difference between truth and falsity "the way we do", and who don't even grasp elementary logic "like we do" is itself a kind of religion. It is a religion promulgated by hawkish and expansionist Israelis for decades, and by their neoconservative allies in the United States. What these folks are now worried about is that unwelcome intrusions from the land of reality might undermine the carefully constructed but psychologically fragile foundations of the faith.

The dehumanizing ideology of Islamophobia provides the ongoing cover for whatever continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians the Israelis see fit to carry out. It is also the basis for the continued Israeli pleas to Americans that Israelis are the ones "on our side" against the murderous, terroristic army of Islam, and are the West's last Middle Eastern bulwark in a new 21st century crusade against the invading Saracens.

The anxiety on display goes beyond concerns about particular foreign policy schemes. It is anxiety over the possible crumbling of a whole frontier barricade of deception, fear and propaganda. It is also anxiety over self-images, and worry that a lot of recent fear and fear-mongering will be shown up as just so much hysterical paranoia. If one styles oneself a heroic fighter at the barricades, and is then revealed to be a quaking hysteric pointing guns into the vacuum, the experience is quite a threat to one's dignity.

For months, these guys did their best to keep Americans from even noticing that Iran was having an election, and that whatever the outcome, the highly imperfect but very real democratic features of Iranian politics are far less regressive than the autocratic by US-friendly regimes of our supposed Arab allies in the region. Now that they have failed in their efforts to direct Americans to pay no heed to that man behind the curtain, they actively and perversely root for the triumph of intolerance, xenophobia and brinkmanship in Iran, since the alternative is a threat to their own ideology of eternal hostility.

Whichever way the election turns out, the mere fact that it has been so intensely contested is reason to start changing an addled US policy toward Iran, a policy based on grotesque misconceptions and propaganda.

Hmm. Guess that "worse is better" perception is more universal than I realized. So... if the war's the thing, does that indicate Bush and the Pentagon really did allow Osama bin Ladin to escape Tora Bora in 2001 - so he could continue as scourge to freedom-loving peoples everywhere, and provide a pretext for our then-planned invasion of Iraq? Abrams was in on the high-level thinking at that time. Hmmm.