The boys who cried "Iran!"

Guess who's to blame if we bomb Iran? You.

Our good friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page (linky thanks to Brendan Nyhan and Matthew Iglesias) have read a certain well-known fable a little differently.

According to Joshua Muravchik of the ever-reliable American Enterprise Institute, war with Iran will be our fault:

With the Bush administration's policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president's freedom to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq--all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.

I've been reading The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!" as a child, and to my child, for decades. I never knew that the townspeople were to blame for the loss of the sheep. Or that the real moral of the story is "Throw yourself all over the place, reacting to every fever-pitched warning anyone throws at you, even if that person has lied to you in the past." But hey - what did that Aesop guy know?

My second-favorite paragraph is this one:

Democracies, it is now well established, do not go to war with each other. But they often get into wars with non-democracies. Overwhelmingly the non-democracy starts the war; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, it is the democratic side that wins. In other words, dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.

So if we want peace, we must have war all the time.

That paragraph also touches on a favorite wingnut meme: "We have to let [insert name of the guy we want to bomb this week] know that we're as crazy as he is!"

I've been hearing that since the first Reagan campaign, and the problem with that seems obvious (though apparently not to everyone): When you let someone know that "we're as crazy as he is," you are in fact doing nothing of the sort. What you're actually doing is betting that Ahmadinejad ISN'T crazy. If he were truly crazy, he wouldn't care about an all-out war including (our) nuclear weapons.

So what Muravchik and his pals are advocating is taking our foreign policy out of our own hands and putting it in the hands of someone who, while he doesn't have nuclear weapons or any plans to attack the U.S., is still pretty bad news, and might in fact have a screw loose.

Great idea, guys!