Peace Is Our Profession

Good news at last from the Gulf - Washington has said that it refuses to be intimidated. The tiny but noble David that is the US navy, with its aircraft carriers and its Patriots of both varieties (launchable/expensive and fleshly/expendable) is daring to take on the Goliath that is Iran, which is guilty of failing to breach the Nonproliferation Treaty in a manner calculated to cause alarm and despondency to the kind of people who believe in forty-five-minute warnings and yellowcake from Africa. The vice-president of the sovereign, independent Iraqi government has called for a "tough international stance" against outside interference in Iraqi politics by the country's neighbours. It is to be hoped that Bush's approaching orgasmic surge of twenty thousand hunks of butcher meat will stop all this foreign meddling once and for all.

Meanwhile, there are rumblings in Iran. President Ahmadinejad is under attack from parliamentarians and is being snubbed by the supreme leadership, apparently because of economic problems and a perception by the theocrats that Washington might have the slightest interest in a peaceful solution to their differences, if only Ahmadinejad's rhetoric were a bit less intemperate. I suppose that's a point of view. Doubtless the pre-empting of Iran's bid for a nuclear world caliphate will be a bit less popular if Ahmadinejad is removed and replaced with someone more emollient; at worst, the US will suffer the kind of public-relations difficulties that arose towards the end of the Cold War, when Russia was no longer a sufficiently convincing Great Satan and some rather threadbare replacements had to be found in Grenada, Libya and Panama. But the Bush administration has always coped admirably with unpopularity.