The Bush administration has been pushing the envelope on arrogance and ignorance for more than six years now. One would think that their capacity for doing worse tomorrow than they did yesterday, and getting away with it, would have sunk in by now at least with the people who have been ringing the alarm bells throughout their tenure. Yet at least some people who should know better still seem to think that there are limits to the administration’s capacity for folly and their ability to survive it.

Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect asks this question about the Bush administration’s efforts to gin up support for a US attack on Iran: “Do the people who have alienated this country and decimated another actually think that they can get away with this — that the natural order would assert itself, and that the people would respond in the usual rallying way if the president went on prime-time television to announce the commencement of air strikes?”

The answer to his question is easy enough. Yes, they probably do believe the public would rally round the flag, and they’re probably right. The support would be shallow and short-term, but it would be there. The question, however, is irrelevant; to assume, as Tomasky does, that the motivation for an attack on Iran is primarily or even significantly political is a mistake, as is the suggestion that the administration “invites its final demise if it repeats its arrogant errors of the past and moves aggressively against Iran.” In fact, there’s less evidence to support the latter proposition than there is to support the administration’s contention that Iran is the root of all evil in Iraq, which is to say that there’s close to none.

The impetus for an attack on Iran comes from Dick Cheney and his scurvy crew. Cheney isn’t above politics but he’s not in thrall to the beast, and in any event his constituency consists of one man, George Bush, who has said, often enough that he should be believed, that in the national security arena his constituency is the same as Cheney’s. If Cheney convinces Bush that an attack is necessary, then an attack there shall be.

The consequences would be dire and enduring for just about everyone in the world, but they wouldn’t spell the administration’s doom. Bush and Cheney will either leave office in January of 2009 or be removed from office between now and then. An attack on Iran won’t alter the passage of time and if Congressional Democrats are to be believed, neither will it greatly increase the chances that Bush and Cheney will be impeached and convicted (and after the fact is too late anyway). There’s also considerable reason to believe that the Constitutional scholars behind the theory that the president is above the law are prepared to argue that impeaching the president for anything he does in that ungovernable sphere is unconstitutional.

No one should assume or even hope that Bush and Cheney will respond positively to pressure from Congress or the courts or the public because they have no history of doing so other than by way of lip service in recognition of electoral demands that neither now face. Cheney has less than two years left in which to remake the world according to his wishes. Bush has less than two years left in which to secure, by his own lights and no one else’s, his legacy.

In the best case scenario, we will enter 2009 with no major changes in the status quo other than that we’ll be two years worse off than we are now because Democrats will have failed to find a way to influence the administration’s conduct in Iraq . That’s bad enough, but in the worst case we’ll enter 2009 in the throes of a constitutional showdown taking place against the backdrop of an approximate Middle East apocalypse. I would dearly love to see some evidence that progressive editorialists such as Tomasky and more than one or two Congressional Democrats recognize the situation and have some thoughts on how to deal with it. If anyone is detecting signs of light at the end of that tunnel, please let me know because I’m missing it.

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