Yesterday at TPM I flagged Sy Hersh's new New Yorker article on the Cheneyite push for war with Iran -- an article as depressing as it is unsurprising. I want to focus in one passage from the piece about arch-Iran hawk Normam Podhoretz ...

Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran poses an imminent threat. In a recent essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force.” Podhoretz concluded, “I pray with all my heart” that President Bush “will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel.”

So this is the threat. Iran overturns the current unipolar world order and replaces it with a new world order dominated by Iran. It's really quite astonishing that people even write this garbage with a straight face. And yet there it is. Lost in all of this is that Iran is, what?, a third rate military power? Maybe?

Let's see if we can line up this comparison: Hitler/Germany, head of industrial superpower in the heart of Europe, engaged in massive rearmament putting it back in place as the dominant land military power in the world. Ahmadinejad, head of country with an economy roughly the size of Alabama, a sizable but largely outmoded military.

Notice any differences?