This morning, the US Secretary of State and hawk-in-residence Hilary Clinton has taken another step in the rhetorical circling around Iran, the argument now is: Iran has turned into a military dictatorship in all but name; the Revolutionary Guards are the de facto power brokers regardless of who’s in charge politically. All of which, for those of us who’d been to the earlier screening of the same show when it was about Irak circa 2003 , is eerily similar to the “Irak is not a democracy anyways” incantations that were used to downgrade the centrality of the WMD argument (back when that “argument” started to become obscenely risible rather than merely tenuous). This is probably both for domestic calculations (whipping up the populace’s paranoia) but also because the “Iran as nuclear threat” scaremongering has been steadily losing traction for the last five years and the Chinese are still refusing to “play ball” on supporting any UN-rubber stamping of a potential US aggression.

When a Super Power starts turning up the lip service to democratic ideals, it’s time to pay attention and to expect the very worst.