Cheney's plan for carpet bombing Iran

Now involves Syria?

ROME - A senior U.S. nuclear official said Friday that North Koreans were in Syria and that Damascus may have had contacts with "secret suppliers" to obtain nuclear equipment.

The neocons obviously realize the jig is up and they will never again be so close to their dreams of imperial superpowerdom. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well go for broke...

The next step will be blowing everything up as a distraction for the next administration to deal with as they leave out the back door with the last of the treasury and the PNAC plans to rule the universe tucked under their shirts.

Update: Tom Legg of The Daai Tou Laam Diary catches Tom Friedman criticizing China for not throwing their weight around in support for economic sanctions on Iran:

Josh at ChinaExpat has some further thoughts on Friedman's time at Dalian.

His most recent pronouncement, lecturing Beijing about Iran and Sudan, looks strangely like a false argument that he has been persistently making over the years. According to RConversation he lectured Chinese officials that the country is "a freeloader" on the diplomatic front. He argues that they let the US work to solve the world's problems while China does nothing, and that Beijing will live to rue the day they made this choice.

This sounds just like an argument that he was making just before the Iraq invasion: "China is behaving as if the Iraq crisis were for America to resolve. That is a serious mistake."

That thought must make the neocons salivate ... having the towering presence of China behind their threats. I think China would rather sit back and watch the neocons completely unravel and take the U.S. down with them than join us in our self-made quagmire.