Spencer Ackerman says “Hormuz” may be Farsi for “Tonkin” as he reads Robin Wright report that, in fact, the Pentagon has no idea what happened and the radio threats “may not have come from the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats that approached them” and may not have been directed at US forces.

Yes, that’s right, the threats against US Navy ships made by IRGC speedboats may not have been made by IRGC speedboats and may not have been against US Navy ships. Nevertheless, the Bush administration chose to leap to conclusions and warmongering.

Now the converse is that I wouldn’t hang too much on the idea that this whole thing was just made up by the Bush administration. If the Bushies cooked it up out of nothing, then it’s not a good idea to raise tensions with Iran. If things went down exactly how they were originally reported, then it’s not a good idea to raise tensions with Iran. The problem is with the administration’s misguided strategic approach to Iran, not with the details of this or that possibly-made-up incident.

Peter Wehner at Commentary gets upset that George W. Bush referred to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as an “occupation.” What’s his ilk going to say about Bush’s disparagement of efforts to turn Palestine into a “Swiss cheese” of isolated cantons?

Meanwhile, good for Bush. His track record on this topic has been so terrible that it’s hard to take his current initiative seriously, but so far as one can tell he’s now moving things in the right direction and I may have been too harsh in this morning’s post. What he’s doing right now is creating positive momentum and could very well lead to a situation where the next president is set up to really accomplish something big.

I’ve noted time and again that one curious element of current US strategy in Iraq is that many of the people charged with planning and implementing it think it will probably fail. Here’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle Eastern Affairs Mark Kimmitt telling people at the Heritage Foundation “if I had to put a number to it, maybe it’s three in 10, maybe it’s 50-50, if we play our cards right.” Now, I think the surge’s proponents are being overly optimistic about this stuff.

But the optimists aren’t especially optimistic. And it’s not as if we’re locked in some desperate battle for national survival where it makes sense to roll the dice on low-probability gambles. The war’s costs are very real and enormous, while the benefits of success are hard to discern and unlikely to materialize.

Michael Hirsch on Bush in the Palestinian territories:

Enough already. We’ve had a president who was the Great Emancipator. And another who was the Great Communicator. Bush is the Great Conflater. In his first term he conflated the threat from Al Qaeda with the threat from Saddam (“You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” Bush said in September 2002), and then tossed groups like Hizbullah and Hamas into the mix (though their goals were markedly different from Al Qaeda’s). Now Bush is suggesting that all the problems he lumped in together can be solved by an equally lumpy panacea of freedom and democracy.

If hollow sloganeering were an adequate substitute for serious American leadership freedom would, of course, have been on the march long ago. On the specifics of the Palestinian issue, Bush’s conflation of freedom, democracy, and self-determination are especially dangerous since he plainly has no intention of taking any of the steps that might actually lead to the creation of an independent Palestine as the main impact at this point is to simply re-enforce the idea that high-flying American rhetoric is just a mask for violence against Arabs.