As Dubya's rhetoric towards Iran heats up, Glenn Greenwald applies a thermometer. He's particularly struck by Dubya's statement in a recent speech that

We will confront this danger before it is too late.

Rumors are swirling from the liberal blogsphere to The New Yorker that this sort of thing presages a bombing campaign on Iraq Iran. And indeed, the London Times (for pedants, that's "the newspaper called 'The Times' that is published in London") had a recent article describing details of at least one war plan for such an attack.

Now, there are reasonable questions to ask about such a plan. Questions like, "Wouldn't pissing off Iran, with a potential Chinese ally, and numerous retaliatory options ranging from disruption of the oil markets to seriously attacking our forces in Iraq, be really stupid?" Or like, "Would the Bush administration ever be deterred from doing any particular thing merely because it's really, really dumb?" But the Times article supplies some perspective:

Bush is committed for now to the diplomatic route.

Readers will recall the way Bush was committed to the diplomatic route in October and November of 2002. He was committed to the diplomatic route as a way of establishing a pretext for military action which he'd already decreed months before.

Re the edit above: blog in haste, repent at leisure.