Steve Clemons sez:

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy…

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf — which just became significantly larger — as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.

The rest.

Joan Walsh:

I’ll wait and see how Tester and Stabenow vote on the cave-in Iraq supplemental funding bill before criticizing them. But I’d like Reid to stop pretending he’s trying to stop the war right now. And I’d especially like him to stop pretending the bill he’s backing is some kind of victory for Democrats. Americans have already “spoken out” on the war. They oppose it. They elected Democrats to end it. Now the Associated Press reports Reid’s boast that the compromise legislation would be the first war-funding bill sent to Bush since the U.S. invasion of Iraq “where he won’t get a blank check.” The president is absolutely getting a blank check, Harry, and Democrats should be honest about it. As proposed, the benchmarks are toothless; they have no consequences, and Republicans are making sure Bush can waive them and continue spending when — note that I didn’t say “if” — Nouri al-Maliki’s government fails to meet them.

Sadly relevant cartoon from 2002 here. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …

Regular correspondent Haans P. has taken the plunge into the blog world, here. And my good friend Jim Bunte is launching new online magazine for toy collectors, here.

Also, John McCrea and CAKE are putting out a CD without the help of a record label. There’s been a lot of talk online lately about the changes the music industry is going through — I think a good way to support independent musicians is to buy their stuff.

ABC:

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

Fantastic.

AND: Don’t read the comments on the ABC website if you tend to get depressed about the human condition.

Chalmers Johnson: “Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?”

Tom Engelhardt: “Close Your Eyes: The Graduation Speech I’ll Never Give”

Frida Berrigan: “We’re # 1!: A Nation of Firsts Arms the World”

Robert Lipsyte: “How We Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Bomb: Mickey Mantle, Barry Bonds, and the Bad Boys of Summer”

In a review of Al Gore’s new book, Dionne mentions, almost as an aside, that…

…the larger change is that the very process Gore describes — of propaganda taken as fact, of slogans taken as arguments, of repetition substituting for logic and, yes, of lies and half-truths taken as truth — is now well-recognized. What worked against Gore during the recount and what worked for the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war doesn’t work anymore. That is an advance for democracy and for reason.

That is an extraordinarily sunny assessment, to put it mildly. I myself am more of a cynic, and will bet E.J. Dionne a moderately priced dinner in a relatively pleasant restaraunt that there will be an effective instance of lies and half-truths taken as truth before the summer is finished. I’ll even handicap him the current examples of propaganda taken as fact and slogans taken as arguments.

You’ve probably already seen the Salt Lake City Tribune article about the alleged MySpace page of Laura Schlessinger’s son Deryk, a paratrooper in Afghanistan:

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

I only find that mildly interesting. But what I find extremely compelling is the Army’s suggestion that this actually is the creation of Osama bin Laden:

Army spokesman Robert Tallman [said] “it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this.

“Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace,” Tallman continued. “Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda.”

I think I speak for everyone when I say that, if Al Qaeda’s propaganda arm has the time and sophistication to create a fake-but-believable MySpace page for Laura Schlessinger’s son, we’re going to lose this thing. I suggest that we surrender immediately, and I for one welcome our new salafist overlords.

Apparently Ron Paul has ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, and we’ve fallen through into another dimension in which U.S. foreign policy is debated on national daytime television.

Pretty amazing. I like this universe much more than the old one.

That is, assuming they want to. Here’s a piece of mine about this in Mother Jones:

What would a serious congressional strategy to block a war with Iran look like? Constitutional scholars and congressional staff agree there’s no one magic answer. The alarming truth is that 220 years after the adoption of the Constitution, there are few settled answers about what legal powers the executive branch possesses to start a war. But there are several steps Congress could take to make a war with Iran politically very difficult for the White House…

The limiting factor on a determined president is not whether an attack is “legal.” Rather, it is how high a political cost he’s willing to pay.

I found it hard to get my mind around this, but it’s true. If the executive branch is determined to do something, it’s extremely difficult for the legislative branch to stop it merely with laws.

For instance, take the spying program about which James Comey just testified. Congress has written clear laws about what domestic surveillance the executive branch can and cannot carry out. And it’s the Justice Department’s job to interpret such laws for the executive branch. But when the Justice Department told the White House that what they were doing was illegal, the White House didn’t say, “Oh! Well, we’ll definitely stop then.” Instead, they decided to keep on doing it. They only modified the program when all the top Justice Department officials threatened to resign.

In other words, it wasn’t the law that stopped them by itself, but the political damage they would have suffered from all the resignations. If they’d been willing to suffer that damage, the White House could have let everyone quit and then hire replacements who’d come up with some theory about why the spying program was legal.

So Congress should pass laws forbidding Bush from attacking Iran—but that by itself isn’t enough. They need to use all the tools they have to create a climate in which the political cost to the Bush administration of starting a war would be excruciatingly high. Those tools are what the article is about.

AND: Speaking of laws, Congress is voting today on the DeFazio-Paul-Hinchey-Lee amendment to the defense authorization bill. This amendment tells Bush he can’t attack Iran without congressional permission. If you think war with Iran is a bad idea, call the Capitol Hill switchboard at 202 224-3121 and ask your representative to support it.

Nope, the vote happened last night, and the amendment failed 136-288. Never trust the word of twelve year-old Capitol Hill staffers. Interestingly, Pelosi isn’t listed there at all.

MORE: Emailers tell me the Speaker of the House generally doesn’t participate in votes like this. Don’t ask me why.

Reader JP forwards a link to declassified U.S. Central Command Powerpoint slides presented to the White House and Rumsfeld in 2002. Some highlights:

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The buildup to the war in 2002 has been largely directed by the President and the Secretary of Defense. Options for initiating a war include responding to “an Iraqi action initially … continue into war.”

* * *

Central Command estimated that only 5,000 US troops would remain in Iraq in December, 2006.

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Some “Key Planning Assumptions.”

More here.