In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee asks, “What is the weakness which exposes a growing civilization to the risk of stumbling and falling in mid-career and losing its Promethean élan?” Toynbee concluded that, most often, from the Persian and Roman Empires all the way through to the British one, whose decline he himself had the opportunity to witness firsthand, the most fundamental problem is the institutional decline of cultural elasticity under the auspices of decadent, short-sighted leaders. It is hard to imagine a more hubristic example of such a cultural cancer than George W Bush. A cultural illiterate who sees the world only in terms of binary oppositions like “with us or against us” and “stay the course” versus “cut and run,” Bush’s polarizing platitudinous paradigms have driven the ailing American machine much further along the path that leadeth to destruction than the nation’s staunchest enemies could ever have dreamt of.

It’s worth noting that many of the Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) and the media had known since the beginning that Iraq posed no threat to America. But Bush’s genius lay in understanding that his opponents’ were wiling to march in cowardly lockstep if he used manipulative language like “Patriot Act” and “Iraqi Freedom” to gloss over his neoconservative opportunism.

Regardless, Bush’s Wild West antics have started to catch up with him, and the American public has finally begun to awaken from its somnambulistic stupor as it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the shower of bodies and dollars cascading down the blood-soaked Mesopotamian drain. With no end to the carnage in sight, the tide of opinion is now turning against an administration that once seemed to embody America’s unified, unwavering resolution and might.

And in its wake, Republicans are scurrying to dissociate themselves from the nightmare of neoconservative magical thinking, which still aspires, in spite of all of the catastrophic evidence, to remake the Middle East in America’s shadow image. In retrospect, these legislators must feel ridiculous to have been hoodwinked into believing that, in the blink of an eye and without internal impetus, business friendly western-style democracy would flourish in the cruel, arid desert.

And yet, according to Counterpunch writer and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, Bush seems to be wishing to up the ante:

“Everything is in place for an attack on Iran. Two aircraft carrier attack forces are deployed to the Persian Gulf, US attack aircraft have been moved to Turkey and other countries on Iran's borders, Patriot anti-missile defense systems are being moved to the Middle East to protect oil facilities and US bases from retaliation from Iranian missiles, and growing reams of disinformation alleging Iran's responsibility for the insurgency in Iraq are being fed to the gullible US media.”

Many commentators have suggested that it’s all just a bluff, that we don’t need to worry about such an escalation since the American military is already overextended and murmurs about an attack on Iran’s incipient nuclear facilities are merely state-disseminated propaganda meant to intimidate Iran into compliance with the Bush administration’s demands that it pull out of Iraq and stop its nuclear program.

Roberts suggests, however, that Iran is genuinely in the crosshairs. All of the salient forces are gathering behind a strike. An emasculated Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wants to attack Iran in order to renew Israeli confidence in his leadership after the Lebanon debacle; Saudi Arabia wants the strike in order to diminish its major military and ideological rival in the region; and Bush is perhaps looking to obfuscate his defeat in Iraq with a greater win in Iran:

“Here is the victory scenario: Bush and Cheney will claim that their air attack on Iran succeeded in destroying Iran’s . . . nuclear weapons program. The victory claimed by the Bush Regime and the propagandistic US media will ‘make America safe from nuclear attack.’ This will restore Bush’s popularity and move the US back to a 50-50 political split in time for Karl Rove to steal the 2008 election with the fraudulent electronic voting machines built and programmed by Republican operatives. . . . The consequences for the US, Israel, and the US puppet regimes in the Middle East will be catastrophic, but they will not occur in the short-run.”

But none of this line of reasoning seems to take into consideration that an attack on Iran could increase not only Iraq’s but also Israel’s and America’s immediate vulnerability to terrorism. After all, modern suicide bombing was invented by Iranians as a measure against Saddam Hussein’s forces back when he was an American proxy during the Iran-Iraq War. And Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps currently has a legion of “suicide volunteers” scattered across the western world, waiting to strap bombs to their backs if America or Israel attacks Iran.

Mohammad-Reza Jaafari, the commander of Iran’s “Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison” and a Brigadier General in the IRGC, recently said, “Now that America is after gaining allies against the righteous Islamic Republic and wants to attack our sanctities, members of the martyrdom-seeking garrisons across the world have been put on alert so that if the Islamic Republic of Iran receives the smallest threat, the American and Israeli strategic interests will be burnt down everywhere. . . . Upon receiving their orders, our martyrdom-seeking forces will be uncontrollable and a guerrilla war may go on in various places for years to come.”

It would take only one dirty bomb in New York or LA to jolt America into a decade-long red alert. And maybe that’s exactly what Karl Rove wants. Maybe the best solution to an inevitable Republican election defeat is to forestall the upcoming presidential election indefinitely.

But how compliant would the much-distracted American public be under martial law? Would a sizeable chunk of the citizenry put its blinders on and get behind the President as it did after 9-11 and in the lead-up to Iraq? Would most of the Democrats and dissident Republicans fall back in line for fear of being deemed weak and unpatriotic? What’s most disconcerting is that, at this point, it may not matter what Bush or Iranian President Ahmadinejad want. This tit-for-tat brinkmanship is quickly reaching a fever pitch. One mis-move on either side could quickly precipitate disaster for everyone involved.

Real diplomacy is not reducible to a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Hopefully, whoever inherits this mess, whether it’s the pseudo-maverick Republican John McCain, the scheming Democrat Hillary Clintons, or Democrat Barack Obama, has the opportunity to inject more nuanced dialogue and compromise into the negotiations.

For the time being, Ahmadinejad’s cards are on the table. Let’s hope that Bush doesn’t bet the farm on this one.