Fred Kaplan wonders if the “prepare to deploy” order that’s “been sent out to U.S. Navy submarines, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers, and two mine-hunting ships” means we’re going to war with Iran. Sam Gardiner, former US Air Force Colonel, concludes that we are in a new report (availble in PDF) for the Century Foundation. Gardiner says the preparations for war “will not be a major CNN event.” Instead, they “will involve the quiet deployment of Air Force tankers to staging bases” and “additional Navy assets moved to the region.” Gardiner makes the point that while nobody’s talking about a land invasion of Iran, significant elements in the government do have more ambitious goals than simple surgical strikes at Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strikes are very unlikely to actually resolve the perceived Iran issue, and there are administration figures who’ve convinced themselves that a sufficiently wide air target set will prompt regime change in Iran. One should note that the curious thing about air power is that the professionals involved in managing it have a longstanding, cross-national, and incredibly pernicious habit of massively and systematically overstating its efficacy in accomplishing all sorts of implausible things.

At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I’ve Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes — in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran — and then simply deny that we’d done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we’d just hit.

Now I rather doubt that’s going to happen. Typically, Bush dials down the crazy factor a notch or two relative to what comes out of the OVP. Nevertheless, it’s a sobering reminder that we have genuine lunatics operating in the highest councils of government at the moment. It’s an extremely dangerous situation.

The new edition of BloggingHeads features an epic three segment battle between myself and Jon Chait about Iraq, incompetence, liberal hawks, etc. In addition, since I stopped working out of the Prospect offices and moved at roughly the same time, I had to try setting up my camera in a totally unfamiliar location and let’s just say I think it might be my worst lighting ever, which is a fairly impressive feat in light of the track record.

I’m in a bit of a bad mood, and this news doesn’t really help matters: “Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.”

But now here’s the rub. Cooperating with Syria on our common interest in combatting Salafist terrorism seems like a very good idea to me. Certainly a much better idea than trying to provoke conflict with Syria by nonsensically lumping it in with some “Islamofascist” bogeyman. And yet, since the United States shouldn’t be in the torture business, colluding with Syria in order to have people tortured is not the sort of cooperation we should be engaged in. That’s my view, and it strikes me as a coherent one reflecting a standard liberal worldview. “Cooperation good; torture bad.” Somehow, though, to the Bush administration we should cooperate with Syria only insofar as it once provided a convenient mechanism for the conduct of torture. That, it seems to me, is a truly deranged worldview.