Apocolypse Now?

President Bush last week says he wants to prevent Iran from "having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

Over the weekend, Our Kurdish allies in the northern part of Iraq harbor a terrorist group that stages a cross-border raid that kills 17 soldiers of our NATO ally, Turkey.

In Baghdad's Sadr City, U.S. warplanes bomb an Shiite neighborhood as soldiers kill 49 "fighters" as military planners bunkered in the Green Zone hatch a full-scale offensive against Shiite militias.

Meanwhile, the Taliban/al Qaeda -- the real terrorist threat in the Middle East -- shows its muscle by killing 130 on the streets of Karachi as Benazir Bhutto, a close ally of the U.S., returns from political exile.

This is American foreign policy in action: ignoring the real threat in the hilly hinterland of Afghanistan/Pakistan while launching a hot war of Us against All in Iraq. In today's Washington Post, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria -- a centrist if ever there was one -- says "the American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality" before launching into a discussion of the wisdom being offered by Norman Podhoretz, who has declared that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler" and is seeking to impose a "new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamo-fascism" on the Middle East.

And what order is the Bush administration, whose ear Podhoretz has, trying to impose? A democracy that sends warplanes against schools and neighborhoods, Kurdish terrorists against allies, and our own soldiers into an endless quagmire against Shiite militias?

It seems to me that we're on the brink of a much wider war in Iraq. Is there no one in Congress that can rein in this out-of-control presidency?