Niall Ferguson, enthusiast for the Iraq war, wants another preemptive strike

Niall Ferguson is out with a 6-point brief in favor of bombing Iran's nuclear installations that James Fallows calls "the stupidest arguments for going to war with Iran." Ferguson's piece really is a paper-thin (and pathologically callous) dismissal of everything that could go wrong for the west and the world after such an attack -- flicking off the warnings of such patsies as former Mossad chief Meir Dagan with flip ripostes such as: 

The eruption of the entire Muslim world. All the crocodiles of Africa could not equal the fake tears that will be shed by the Sunni powers of the region if Iran’s nuclear ambitions are checked.

For Dagan, the "eruption" of Hamas and Hezbollah with Iran-supplied rockets is itself enough to outweigh the risk of trying other means of deterrence.  And perhaps Ferguson's noticed that  "Sunni powers" are not exactly a slam-dunk these days for containing the eruptions of their people.

For those who feel themselves swept along by such confident-sounding bluster, it's worth revisiting Ferguson's advice to Americans, freighted with his admittedly encyclopediac knowledge of European history, as the Bush administration geared up to attack Iraq in December 2002.  Purporting to adapt Clauswitz's diplomacy-by-other-means approach to war to the contemporary "war on terror", Ferguson exhorted the U.S. to follow a jolly good precedent and use war liberally: