What kind of nut wants war with Iran?

"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

By Joseph Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers

There were some things far more frightening last week than Halloween's small ghouls and goblins -- and the scariest of all is the Bush administration's seemingly inexorable march toward military confrontation with Iran.

What are they smoking at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? The very idea is dumb as a fencepost and best left to the biggest pied piper of what passes for neoconservative thought, Norman Podhoretz. Yet President Bush and his able assistant, Vice President Dick Cheney, are marching to that tune and humming along lustily.

There is no crisis here and no earthly reason to manufacture one on short notice, except for the fact that in less than 15 months, the Bush administration will pass ignominiously into history. Then a new chief executive can begin dealing with ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a national debt nearing $10 trillion, a terrorist threat to America only made stronger by eight years of Bush and Cheney, and a national economy trembling on the brink of recession.

As though that weren't a big enough mess to leave behind, these brilliant thinkers want to bequeath a third and far more dangerous war to whoever is unlucky enough to win the tussle of midgets that passes for a presidential contest.

There are two questions here: Why? And why now?

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