With their every dream, ambition and prediction for Iraq in ruins, the Bush administration and its neocon court are now in a panic. What can they do next? How can they distract the American people from their catastrophic and incompetent record on Iraq before the November election?

The answer is simple. It was stated quite expressly by Rice this past weekend: Don't worry about our failure to find any evidence of WMD after our preemptive war on Iraq -- we may be forced to take such preemptive action very soon against its neighbor, Iran.

If that October surprise doesn't rally voters back around Bush and ensure four more years for him and the neocons, what will?

The pattern of preparation for this is all too familiar from the buildup to war with Iraq. First, the war drums are sounded by the same old "experts"; then they are amplified by alarmist columnists. Once you see Krauthammer or Ledeen opining, as they have over the past two months, that Iran's nuclear capability poses the gravest possible threat to Civilization as We Know It, and that The World Cannot Afford to Wait and Negotiate, then you can guarantee -- conveniently close to the election to panic voters into supporting the president -- that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will pick up the chorus.

Ledeen has already written at least two columns on the subject. Krauthammer, prophet of the Iraq war, has made quite clear his determination to unleash a new one. In his July 23 Post column he wrote: "The long awaited revolution [in Iran] is not happening. Which makes the question of preemptive attack all the more urgent ... If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the 'Great Satan' will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or preemptive strike."

From the perspective of the chimerical and deranged weltpolitik, or "global strategy," of the neocons, targeting Iran is not merely a tactic of desperation but the fulfillment of what their plans were from the beginning. For the subjugation of Iraq under the puppet Chalabi was always seen as only the first step toward toppling target No. 2 -- Iran -- in the president's famous "axis of evil."

Chalabi, of course, blotted his copybook by being exposed as having been entirely compromised by Iranian intelligence in the first place (though many would still rather defend him and slander the integrity of the institutions of U.S. intelligence that exposed him). And so the unfortunate Iyad Allawi was hastily shoehorned into the high-risk job of prime minister of Iraq that had been lovingly prepared for Chalabi. But the neocon goal remains the same: Use the new, "strong fortress" of pro-American Iraq as the launching point to destabilize and topple the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In reality, of course, Iraq is anything but a fortress. The embattled U.S. troops there are on the defensive -- an understaffed, overstretched, exhausted force in a nation that has almost universally rejected them and about which they were given tragically inadequate preparation.

However, blaming Iran for America's continued failure to tame Iraq conveniently creates a new demon, distracting the public once again from the incompetence and irresponsibility of those who plunged the United States into that quagmire in the first place. And once a new, far bigger conflict has been generated and Bush has been safely reelected, the American public can presumably be rallied around the flag once again.

Certainly, Iran's steady moves toward acquiring nuclear weapons are a major challenge for the United States and the rest of the world. But there are other ways to deal with them. Joseph Stalin's acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1949 did not prompt the United States to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. And although Mao Zedong killed at least 30 million of his own people with lunatic policies, massacres, purges and wild utopian experiments, neither Democratic nor Republican presidents ever came close to considering a preemptive nuclear attack against the People's Republic of China when it developed thermonuclear weapons in the 1960s. Why, then, is an action that could very well trigger nuclear warfare with Iran urgent and vital now when it was not necessary against far more dictatorial regimes that slaughtered infinitely larger numbers of people in the past?

Can Bush and his neocons get away with such an outrageous thing a second time after being so thoroughly discredited the first time? Why not? They got away with it before.

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