It's still summer but the word in Washington is that, come fall, the neocon crowd that helped lie us into Iraq will be out trying to do the same thing with Iran.
Commentary, the magazine which invented neoconservatism, is already announcing that sanctions have failed and it's time for the next step.
And this neocon manifesto argues that war is bad, but a lot better than no war. Of course, nobody takes Commentary seriously (it is too open about its "Greater Israel first" agenda). But it still is valuable because of what it tells you about neocon thinking.
But Jeff Goldberg of the Atlantic is something else. He writes for Atlantic and Atlantic (both the magazine and the blog made famous by Andrew Sullivan) matters.
In late August, the influential Goldberg will be coming out with a cover story urging the United States to attack Iran so that Israel doesn't have to. Goldberg, an American who served in the Israeli army as a guard at a Palestinian prison camp, is about as close to the "pro-Israel" lobby as one can be without actually working at headquarters.
He also was, as Harper's reported in an important piece, a key advocate of the Iraq war, who recklessly spread some of the lies that helped create the debacle that cost so many thousands of lives.
War with Iran would be a disaster for America, for Iran and for Israel. It would also put America's forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in even more danger than they are in now.
Will that stop the neocons from urging the US or Israel to "Pearl Harbor" Iran? No. Why would it?