Sarah Palin has a suggestion for how Barack Obama can save his presidency. “Say he decided to declare war on Iran,” she said on Fox News last week. “I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and decide, well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he is today.” Such talk is in the air again. Palin was picking up the idea from Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative Middle East expert who suggested a strike would reverse Obama’s political fortunes. (Actually, Palin attributed the idea to Patrick Buchanan, but obviously entirely misread Buchanan’s column, which opposed Pipes’s suggestion. It’s getting tiresome to keep pointing out these serial gaffes, but Palin does appear to be running for president.)

It is important to recognize the magnitude of what people like Sarah Palin are advocating. The United States is being asked to launch a military invasion of a state that poses no imminent threat to America, without sanction from any international body, and with few governments willing to publicly endorse such an action. Al Qaeda and its ilk would present it as the third American invasion of a Muslim nation in a decade, proof positive that the United States is engaged in a war of civilizations. Moderate Arab states and Muslim governments everywhere would be on the defensive. As Washington has surely come to realize, wars unleash forces that cannot be predicted or controlled.

Fareed, on the continued push from the right for war on Iran.