Andante, a little more than a century ago British general Gordon died at the battle of Khartoum in Sudan in a war with the forces of an earlier claimant to the title of al Mahdi. Periodically a Muslim leader will get carried away with his own PR and declare himself al Mahdi, or a new Salah al-Din, ready to proclaim the age of Islamic glory. These claims get a lot of people killed. [The original Salah al-Din, Yusuf ibn Ayyub, who battled Richard Cœur de Lion in the Crusades was born in Tikrit. The Tikriti, like Saddam, tend to ignore the fact he was a Kurd when they claim a piece of his reflected glory.]

The neocons have opened Pandora’s Box.

Saddam was given faux WMDs, ties to al Quaeda, etc. – but Iran has done nothing (so far) that merits a direct attack by missles or otherwise. How could this be anything but tantamount to a provocation for WAR (casus belli) on Iran’s part against the U.S.?