I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder who pulled their leg this time. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of our Iraqi allies were involved; Ahmad Chalabi comes to mind, since he spent a lot of time in Iran over the years.

I bring this up because it still seems likely that the US will attack Iran, and a certainty that Obama will light into Afghanistan in as big a way as he can manage once he gets into office. My sentiment remains that Iran is the cherry atop Dick Cheney’s Armageddon Sundae, but others are now suggesting that it may well be president Obama who will do the deed, which exceeds even my lowest published expectations.

Cheney, as we know, has had something like 600 heart attacks. He’s living on borrowed time, and has a fast-shrinking window through which he can squeeze his portly self to leave his lasting legacy (no, not that window). The Bush administration, as we know, operates on the principle that no horror it authors can be the last or worst. How does one top a global financial meltdown? Why, by sealing the deal with an attack that will send oil up to where it was and beyond to the stratosphere. Nobody has money, nobody can afford oil, nobody can build stuff, nobody could buy it … et voila!

Others, however, are looking at the machinations of Dennis Ross, probably best known as the Clinton administration envoy who couldn’t seal an Israel-Palestine peace deal, which somehow enhanced his reputation enormously. Ross is Barack Obama’s point man on Iran — he’s the candidate’s Middle East advisor, angling for something similar or better in an Obama administration — and the commentary collected by Moon of Alabama’s Bernhard, including a bit from David Sanger at the New York Times, indicates that he’s as hard core anti-Iran as one can get without parachuting in with a commando knife in your teeth. Interestingly, the pieces suggest he’s also desperately disposed in Israel’s favor, which raise the question of how effective an envoy he could have been. That is, if the outcome hadn’t already raised it.

Regarding genocide: Nir Rosen, who did sterling work in Iraq, went off to Afghanistan recently armed only with his Arabic, Farsi and what he picked up of the lingo most of the Taliban speak, Pashtu, in a bizarre one-week Berlitz blitz. Rosen’s graphically illustrated point, which is one I’ve made early and often here but without, you know, literally and immediately risking my life, is that the war in Afghanistan is no longer winnable: whether or not we had to be there in the first instance, we blew it. The only way to win now is to try to killl everyone.

That’s not legal under the current rules for killing people, but neither was the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, and any number of things we did subsequent to that, and of course torturing people was not recently legal either. We have seen that borders can blurred, definitions muddled, morals held down, fitted with concrete overshoes and dropped in the South China Sea.

So these things, these crimes, these desecrations of the flesh and spirit, aren’t immutable. It may become necessary, by some lights, to kill sufficient Iranians or Afghanis that the action qualifies as genocide. But one has to wonder, what’s the dividing line? Genocide is any of a number of actions taken with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Among the actions, not surprisingly, is directly killing them.

You see how right off the bat, we’re in trouble. What if the intent isn’t to destroy every living thing we run across, or over, but simple to bring peace to a troubled land? We’re Americans; how could anyone possibly imagine that our pogrom program to kill as many people as it takes might be genocide? I’m pretty sure many if not most Americans couldn’t, not in light of the atrocities they will have perpetrated against us, or Israel, or their plans to do so, even if the rest of the world were more skeptical.

I blame the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon for putting the final spike in the forehead of American political morality, but in fact there’s always been little American governments could do to get into terminally hot water with its consituents except an over the top scandal, increasingly hard to achieve as the top rises (thanks, Dick!), or an election-year recession. Where killing is concerned, we’ve always been bloodthirstily pragmatic: just keep it to a reasonable length of time, and you can kill as many as you please, and god bless our boys and girls.

There aren’t all that many Persians, and I oppose bumping them off even in small numbers. Barack Obama’s commitment to not bumping them off was never a lock, and now it begins to look as though the lock has flipped. And he’s already committed himself to increasing the number of US troops in Afghanistan — which means knocking off more wedding parties and other threats to our security — something he can’t renenge on without looking like a sissy.

Maybe he’s that secure with himself.

I don’t think Obama will commit genocide in Iran or Afghanistan (or anywhere else). I do think he will continue normalizing war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that doing so will help further the Bush administration’s own efforts in that arena, to all of our detriments. If Obama wishes to avoid becoming a war criminal himself, his options are to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, or get out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t think John McCain will commit genocide either, not least because he’ll never have the opportunity. Plus he’d hate the way it made people look at him. But he too would be pleased by the opportunity to rassle up some more troops and put them to good use killing the tinted wherever they can be found.

Getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t options for McCain, of course. And I’ll bet you all that I don’t have that Obama doesn’t exercise his.

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