So, what do you think about Diego Garcia?

[DFW]

10. The only disagreement I ever had with Wes Clark was over Iran

And I won it. It was almost exactly 20 years ago.

We were right in the middle of the Iraq fiasco, and Cheneybush was/were looking for a distraction—any distraction—to get people’s minds off Iraq by the 2006 midterms. Wes was convinced that Cheney was going to invade Iran. I said I was sure he wouldn’t do it, even if he didn’t have a house on Kish (it’s now no longer in Cheney’s name, but rather!! in Halliburton’s). Wes asked me why I was so sure?

I explained that Republicans never invaded or attacked a country that they knew would shoot back. Reagan invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada. Bush, Sr. invaded Panama. Junior invaded Iraq, but that was a miscalculation. Rumsfeld had said it would take “maybe six days, maybe six weeks, certainly not six months.” Oops. An invasion of Iran would take way more than six months, and if there are a few ten thousand Americans killed in those first six months after the start of an invasion, with a few hundred or thousand POWs as hostages, you can bet before the next election, the voters will turn on the Republicans with no mercy for the ones in office who robotically endorsed the invasion.

I don’t see any huge surge in Republican courage, nor do I see anything we have to gain as a nation from invading Iran, so I still think they’ll huff and they’ll puff and they’ll not invade. Send some missiles or drop some bombs, something we’ll regret later, but actually invade the country? I don’t see it.