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In one sense, I agree with Steve Clemons, who wrote last month of the many terrible and entirely foreseeable consequences that would follow an attack on Iran and concluded that those worried by the prospect should “stop hyperventilating.” Clemons, who’s very well connected to the intelligence and defense communities, wrote:

While there are individuals in the Obama administration who are flirting with the possibility of military action against Iran, they are fewer in number than existed in the Bush administration. They are surrounded by a greater number of realists who are working hard to find a way to reinvent America’s global leverage and power — and who realize that a war with Iran ends that possibility and possibly spells an end to America presuming to be the globally predominant power it has been.

But Clemons also notes that while states tend to “operate mostly through carefully considered strategic calculus, such is not always the case.” He was discussing Iran, but the same could be said of the United States. It was, after all, only slightly less foolish, and the consequences just as predictable, to attack Iraq while we were engaged in a hot war in Afghanistan in 2003. But we did it anyway. The idea that we’d be greeted as liberators and everything would be fine was as transparently silly as any that’s ever crossed a human mind. Certainly as ridiculous as the notion that an attack on Iran could be anything but disastrous.