At the tendency’s greatest extreme, we get people, like National Security Adviser John Bolton, who have only one setting — full-force bluster — and view the threat of war as the solution to every problem in the world. It’s a sign of how much power such hyper-hawks now wield in the nation’s capital that an administration clearly planning for war with Iran has done so little to make a public case for it. So far, that case amounts to, “Iran wants a nuclear weapon, which we oppose, though we have no evidence to show that it’s working on one, and we tore up the agreement reached during the Obama administration that was keeping it from working on one, and it is aiding one side in a civil war in Yemen that really pisses off Saudi Arabia, and the Iranian government says lots of nasty, threatening things about Israel, and there were, or maybe could have been, some attacks on some ships in the Strait of Hormuz that Iran may or may not have had something to do with.”…

The list of unanswered questions is long: Why is it in our interest to fire missiles at a country of 80 million people 6,000 miles away from American shores? What would be the goal and the strategy behind it? If such actions destabilize the Iranian government, what would come next? Would we seek to occupy the country? Since that would require many times the 120,000 troops administration officials have been contemplating sending to the region, the answer is probably no. But then are we prepared to stand by while the country descends into chaos, becoming yet another experiment in anarchy set in motion by reckless American actions?