I'm gonna fuck you up for saying you won't let me fuck you up.

"Iran Threatens Retaliation if Attacked."

So reads the headline. I suppose in the anarchic schoolyard sort of world that our nation seems presently intent on creating, such phrasing reads with depressing ease as ordinary bully-bully, chest puffing: "Oh yeah? Touch me again and see what happens!" "Oh yeah? You touch me again and see what happens!" And so on through an embarrasingly impotent series of escalating pseudo-threates until such time as one boy reels off and pops the other in the nose, at which point both start crying, one from the pain and one from the sight of blood.

Of course neither boy has a nuclear bomb tucked inside his jacket, but juvenile psychology is remarkably consistent on all scales, from boys to nations, a veritable fractal geometry of felt inadequacies projected as aggression on the rest of the immediate world.

Still, there's a perversity in that Times article that reflects on our principle problem as a nation, and then again on nationalism itself, which is just tribal exceptionalism by any other name. Despite the preposterous and evasive contention that "the Bush administration has insisted it is pursuing a diplomatic path, even while vaguely holding open the distant option of imposing sanctions or taking military action if diplomacy fails," the fact remains that it is the United States, not Iran, which threatens aggression. To call the Iranian response to our increasingly provacative and unveiled threats "escalating rhetoric" is worse than a lie. It's we, not they, who openly propose to use nuclear weapons against a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked us, nor indicated that it plans to attack us in the near or forseeable future.

Argument by Escher: that which follows precedes. Iranian promises of self-defense (retaliation!) in the case of American aggression are recycled by our official media as casus belli for . . . American aggression, as if any sovereign nation that doesn't go supine at the merest hint of American displeasure has created through the mere possibility of future intransigence the occasion for war.

This is what I and other information critics mean when we talk about polluted discourse. Creating self-fulfilling apocalyptic visions is no way to run a nation. These stories only add to the sense of doomed inevitability about an eminently evitable conflict: we cease to discuss the essential issue, that it's not right nor just nor necessary to invade another nation without the provocation of an attack, and instead we fatuously take up the notion that Iran's impossible promise of disproportionate retaliation in-and-of-itself indicates that Iran poses a immediate danger.

I remain unconvinced that the Crawford Khan and his Horde have the wherewithal to invade Iran, but that hardly diminishes the danger posed by a nation like the United States making it national belief and national policy to forbid any other nation from defending itself--to remake defense as an act of aggression, since, as Max Boot snivels, we are the good guys, regardless . . .

Bref: It is poor form, when accused of being a Zionist Crusader state, to oblige your accusers by becoming one.