I’ve been making this argument for years. Glenn Greenwald boils it down:

We continuously hear about how grave a problem is the Iranian nuclear program. It never seems to occur to the likes of Tom Friedman that — just as one might be motivated to buy a gun if one’s neighborhood were infested with roving crime gangs — countries decide that it might be rational for them to acquire nuclear weapons given that the world’s superpower is run by warmongering crazies such as Friedman, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Mike O’Hanlon and Fred Kagan. Deranged neoconservative militarism isn’t the solution to nuclear proliferation; it’s a cause.

Absolutely. To whatever extent Iran was working on getting a nuke before we declared them a charter member of the “Axis of Evil” and invaded their neighbor - don’t you think they likely stepped up work in the wake of that?

If you were in charge of Iran - isn’t that exactly what you would have done?

It astonishes me that neoconservatives can be so flat-out foolish to believe that adversaries are going to tremble before our might, drop their weapons and beg for mercy when we rattle our big ol’ American saber. It’s not the way the world works; but neoconservatism, I suppose, is all about circumventing the way the world works.

As an acquaintance of mine is fond of saying - how’s that working out?