Naturally, Charles Krauthammer thinks we should start a war with Iran. Why anyone would pay attention to the man who proclaimed Iran “months away” from a nuclear bomb in January I couldn’t say. There was also this hilarious moment in April 2003: “Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.”

So he has a credibility problem. And various reading comprehension problems. The Klein / Rosenfeld tag team at Tapped does a good job of demolishing most of this, but there’s more. Consider: “The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age.” Infinitely more likely than . . . Harry Truman? Just a little sloppy writing and foregetfulness, I imagine, but it’s still pretty bizarre to think that someone would be so slipshod with their own column in a widely read newspaper. It’s also, I think, indicative of a generally slipshod approach to the world, an inattention to detail and Krauthammer’s trademark casual disregard for the truth.

Peter Beinart’s right about this:

That doesn’t make Iran benign. But it does raise questions about whether the claim Arendt made about totalitarian regimes–that their messianic character made them inherently expansionist–fits Ahmadinejad’s, too. A war against Islamic totalitarianism has clear boundaries: It means a struggle against violent salafis. A war against Islamofascism does not, and that is precisely the point: It lets the Bush administration add enemies–first Iraq, now Iran–while implying that they share Al Qaeda’s ideology and represent the same kind of threat. That’s not true, and five years after September 11, it has left Americans increasingly confused about who we are fighting, and increasingly skeptical that we can win.

Quite so. My level of worry about a war with Iran, meanwhile, has just gone up several notches. Was speaking to what’s got to count as one of your more dovish Israeli politicians, someone eager to make peace with a genuinely independent Palestine that would have Jerusalem as its capital city, who kept saying repeatedly that he thought another war between Israel and Iran in the not-too-distant future is all but inevitable. Hezbollah, in his view, is nothing but a “commando division of Iran” and Hassan Nasrallah “is a division commander of Ahmadenijad.” He dismissed a question about a looming Iraq-Iran alliance by saying Iran is simply taking control of the government in Baghdad and that “this is another good reason to topple the regime in Teheran.” I suppose I see where he’s coming from, but a person who thinks that sort of regional dynamic is going to be — of all things — conducive to a comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t thinking very clearly.

This debate’s been roiling over at the Prospect and I waded in with a take roughly along these lines, but I think Krugman really nails it:

Consider this: The United States economy is far richer and more productive than it was a generation ago. Statistics on economic growth aside, think of all the technological advances that have made workers more productive over the past generation. In 1973, there were no personal computers, let alone the Internet. Even fax machines were rare, expensive items, and there were no bar-code scanners at checkout counters. Freight containerization was still uncommon. The list goes on and on.

Yet in spite of all this technological progress, which has allowed the average American worker to produce much more, we’re not sure whether there was any rise in the typical worker’s pay. Only those at the upper end of the income distribution saw clear gains — gains that were enormous for the lucky few at the very top.

That’s why the debate over whether the middle class is a bit better off or a bit worse off now than a generation ago misses the point. What we should be debating is why technological and economic progress has done so little for most Americans, and what changes in government policies would spread the benefits of progress more widely. An effort to shore up middle-class health insurance, paid for by a rollback of recent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans — something like the plan proposed by John Kerry two years ago, but more ambitious — would be a good place to start.

The thing of it is is that in order to articulate the point properly, Democrats are going to need to re-learn the word “inequality,” something that seems to have vanished from their vocabulary in the late 80s or early 90s.