As James Fallows let the whole world know in the current Atlantic Monthly, the United States really has no good military options vis-à-vis Iran. (They war-gamed it and everything...) But in order for diplomacy to work at all, we certainly have to act like we have good military options, or that we might even be lunatic enough to risk a bad military action.

Presumably that's the rationale behind this bit of saber-rattling from Gen. John Abizaid, as reported by Dawn: "Why the Iranians would want to … cause us to use our air or naval power against them would be beyond me. We have an incredible amount of power." They say Nixon got shit done by convincing everyone he was crazy. Ditto Bush?