Sounds like "Terror"

Remember the "War on Terror"? That was the one just before the "War on Tyranny," which is America's sacred mission for Bush's second term. (Here's another blast from the past: remember Bush's "humble foreign policy"?)

I can see how easy it is to confuse Terror and Tyranny. That would appear to be the idea. Slur them like the lord of Crawford's potemkin farm, and they sound pretty much the same. After all, they both start with "T," and have, according to the Pentagon accounting office, the same number of syllables.

Clearly this is part of the Iran rollout, Tehran having been found to have a terror deficit. And everything seems on track for a summer strike:

USAF playing cat and mouse game over Iran

NEW YORK -- The U.S. Air Force is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Iran's ayatollahs, flying American combat aircraft into Iranian airspace in an attempt to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars, thus allowing U.S. pilots to grid the system for use in future targeting data, administration officials said.

"We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The flights, which have been going on for weeks, are being launched from sites in Afghanistan and Iraq and are part of Bush administration attempts collect badly needed intelligence on Iran's possible nuclear weapons development sites, these sources said, speaking on condition of strict anonymity.

"These Iranian air defense positions are not just being observed, they're being 'templated,'" an administration official said, explaining that the flights are part of a U.S. effort to develop "an electronic order of battle for Iran" in case of actual conflict.

In the ramp-up to Iraq, many historical analogies were drawn to Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. I think they were mistaken. Iraq was more of a Czechoslavakia circa 1938, as the world's powers conceded a "small country far away of which we know little." Tut-tut, and all that, but Hitler had the Sudetenland, and then the rest. It was when he took the rest, the Czech territories, and absorbed for the first time non-Germanic people into the Reich, that Europe braced for war before the tripwire of Poland.

The UN washed its hands of Iraq and let Bush have his war to "disarm Saddam." Two years later, with no weapons to show for the blood and Iraqis staring at a perpetual occupation, the world knows appeasement is worth less than zero. The neocons will either be stopped, or they'll carry the world before them. They are in their strength, and there's no compromise.

Where to stop them.

Iran, I believe, is the tripwire. The point of no return for America.

Hitler didn't really believe Britain would go to war over Poland. He thought Chamberlain would back down again, and concede him another easy conquest. But Britain and France, finally, had their "Fool me once, shame on you" moment.

Though Russia and China are not obligated to its defence, let's not kid ourselves: Iran is of strategic importance to both. Particularly China. Iran is its principal source of petroleum and natural gas. American control of its reserves could be calamatous to its, and Russia's, 21st Century energy strategy. The Chinese leadership can read the PNAC documents as well as we can. They know encirclement when they see it. They would be foolish not to do something. And don't think they aren't now.

It needn't be military. As I write, China may be launching a pre-emptive economic war against the United States. Yesterday's announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos that China, America's largest creditor, has lost faith in the US dollar and will seek to broaden the yuan's exchange rate with a "basket of currencies," could be the equivalent of a decapitation strike.

And meanwhile, there's the big story. The one my children will inherit:

Study finds Earth temperature "skyrocketing"

The largest ever climate-change experiment reveals that scientists may have dramatically underestimated the threat of global warming.

The study by British scientists, which is published today, found the planet's global temperature could climb by between 2C and 11C because of skyrocketing levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. That more than doubles the current prediction of a 1.4C to 4.5C rise this century.

"When we started out we didn't expect anything like this," said Oxford University's David Stainforth, chief scientist for climateprediction.net.... "If this is the case, it's very dramatic and very scary," Mr Stainforth said.

...

Even rises that are more modest are expected to trigger disastrous changes, including melting glaciers, sea-level rises, shut-down of the Gulf Stream, and increases in droughts, cyclones and other extreme weather events. The new results follow two reports in last week's edition of Science, showing that global warming probably caused the "Great Dying".

Human life is simply too short for most of us to care much about environmental consquences. Or, it has been. What's changed is not our lifespan, but the Earth's carrying capacity for our bad choices.

Even if the Bush White House doesn't trigger a fiscal meltdown, or a global hot war, or both, we have maybe five or ten good years left to enjoy the poisonous fruits of our over-devoloped world. We could spend that time making good choices for a change - make a deathbed conversion with respect to greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energies. But that would take a Manhattan Project-like commitment on a global scale, and Manhattan Projects have only arisen when there are people to kill, not planets to save. So I'd say the choice has been made, and it's not a wise one.

The Earth can be a bit of a tyrant, too. Good luck with that.