Gulp

William Polk (who I mentioned before in this post) has written a guest post at Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog. I'm reading his Understanding Iraq at present, like Violent Politics it's informative and concise. Also, he has the good sense to live in Vence.

There he gives a detailed assessment of the chances of going to war with Iran, and frankly, it scared the shit out of me. Polk's credentials include:

William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs.

So he's not one of your hot-headed bloggers that get all that well deserved opprobrium from the MSM.

If it does come down, I would think that the middle of summer would be avoided, I've heard that visibility in the Gulf goes way down. So it would be in the next few months, or the fall. Fall would mean election season, it could be more dicey, politically. That close, McCain might prefer to blow up the world himself.

Today's latest idiocy from Feckless Leader doesn't help calm my nerves:

"The problem is the government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now, who knows; and secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people -- some in the Middle East," Bush said. "And that's unacceptable to the United States, and it's unacceptable to the world."

snip...

Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation specializing in nuclear policy, called Bush's statement "uninformed" and "troubling."

"Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason," he said. "It's just not true."

Asked to explain Bush's comment, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said he spoke in "shorthand," combining Iranian threats against Israel with concerns about Iran's nuclear program.

So now Feckless Leader speaks in shorthand. Oy.