Joe Klein on the Idiots at the Washington Post on Iran

There Will Be Blood - Swampland – TIME.com

The failure to understand this basic fact--the failure to even care what Iranians, even the Iranians who hate the regime, actually think--is at the heart of the lethal carelessness that marked the Bush Junior's Administration and neoconservative thinking in general. I would guess that the Supreme Leader--which is the man's actual title, no matter how Krauthammer disdains it--is itching for an excuse to send tanks into the streets. (Which he may well do anyway.) If Barack Obama were sounding like John McCain, the tanks would have been in the streets days ago, with hundreds, perhaps thousands of people killed, and a ready excuse that would have great credibility with the Iranian people: the U.S. was at it again, trying to foment a revolution to overthrow the duly elected government of Iran.

But then, in the long-term scheme of things, the neoconservatives would undoubtedly argue, blood will be spilled in the pursuit of freedom. Undouboutedly true, but you don't want the blood to be on your hands. You want it to be the choice of those who are risking their lives in the streets.

The problem is that the blood is never on the hands of the neo-cons. They never fight their own battles. They always find surrogates or, even better, the sons and daughters of their followers. I have yet to find a neo-con that actually risks anything personally in the wars they seek to foment.