I’ve been fascinated by this Martin Rowson cartoon from today’s Guardian – George W Bush as the little boy crying wolf, drowning in a sea of blood as he points frantically to an amused lupine Ahmadinejad sprawled on the shore and dipping his paw in the red stuff.

Presumably it means that Bush has expended his political capital by yelling “Wolf! Wolf!” over phony non-existent threats such as Saddam’s WMD, and that now he’s faced with a real wolf no-one will pay any attention to him. Or, alternatively, it could mean that Bush himself is responsible for the massive bloodbath and is trying to deflect blame on to a wolf who’s no threat to anybody – which, indeed, is what many believe about Ahmadinejad (very unpopular, economy a disaster, and besides, under Iran’s constitution, the president is only one of several fingers on the nuclear button, etc).

Or perhaps there is some third interpretation I’ve missed. Still, whatever it is, it’s bound to be Bush’s fault.

Isn’t it truer to say that in this instance the wolf has been leaping about repeatedly calling, “Hey, villagers, here I am!” and threatening to wipe the sheep pasture off the face of the map? And the little shepherd boy Bush, far from crying “Wolf! Wolf!” hysterically, behaved very calmly and referred the matter to the European Union Wildlife Management Committee to chew over for three or four years. They’ve now concluded that, in the course of their consultations with the wolf, he somehow managed to build a lamb-kebabing factory on the edge of the sheep field. But it’s no danger because he’s probably vegetarian. And anyway the real threat to stability is the obdurate kosher butcher down the road.

The Iran question sets a deeply disturbing precedent, even if the threat of genocide is just a rhetorical flourish. For it sets a new bar in international discourse, in which heads of government will be able to threaten genocide against neighboring states, and will expect to be extended the same benefit of the doubt as Ahmadinejad. In other words, it’s the wolves who get to go around crying “Wolf!”, and the onus is on us to prove on which particular occasion they happen to mean it.