I hope this is just alarmism, but Seymour Hersch and Scott Ritter have also been writing about this same theme.
Excerpt:
"Editor’s Note: The former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author of the bestseller “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” reports on Bush’s plan for Iran, and how a callous war, conceived by zealots, will lead to a disaster of biblical proportions."
Very interesting article, but a little on the alarmist side.
Bush is a bozo, but I don't think he's such a bozo that we need to freight him with the end-of-times nonsense that some of his Xtian Fundie base buys into in such a big way. [Besides, it ain't time yet -- per Biblical prophecy this must be preceded by, among other things, the conversion of the Jews in Israel to Xtianity, and I ain't see any of that happen yet]. And as long as DoctorGonzo is around, well, fat chance THAT will ever come to pass.
I remember RReagan made a coment as Prez, he wondered aloud if he was living in the generation which will see the end times. People got sufficiently worked up over this back around 1985, but we're still here.
A more basic fact -- unless Bush is thinking of some exotic preventive/pre-emptive limited nuclear war option against the pernicious Persians, what war card does he have to play? The US army is currently tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan [I know, I know, it's preparatory for a pincer movement against Iran] with few assets to spare. And you don't expect Israel to come ridingt o the rescue, do you? [NB - this is sarcasm].
I do not doubt that Bush and the NeoConMen and the Israelis and the Xtain Fundies could by hook and by crook blunder the US into a major war with Iran. But like pretty much everything out of his mouth, POTUS Bush's profession of the Fundie faith are designed primarily for cynical political purposes. There are no sincere bones in his body. The cause will be terminally fouled up politics, not terminally fouled up misinterpreted religious divination and superstition.
I hope I'm right.
I hope your NOT right !!!!! By the way..........
What the hell is a "preventive/pre-emptive limited nuclear war option".... Did not the disaster at Chernobyl teach us anything....There cannot be ANY limited nuclear war option!!!!
But it's the "responsible decisions-makers" about whom I have my doubts.
It's sometimes called discriminate nuclear targeting or something similarly catchy and euphemistic. Somewhere on a bookshelf i have an academic anthology on the topic, i'll post the title and authors/editors when I get back from losing my bet.
a little more deeply than we are here.
So some basic questions - what are we willing to do to prevent nuke proliferation in Iran? What's the bottom line? Are we gonna strike their facilities? I suspect that's the bottom line, which puts us in a perennial state of low-grade war with them.
Just what we need, eh?
So who's going to go along and partner with us? Ideally, NATO. Wanna bet? Probably the best bet would be that we could BUY people's cooperation.
It'd be much harder for the Iranians to do much if major states are all buying into pre-empting their nuke capabilities.
I think the alternative is to live with the fact the Iranians will go nuclear sooner or later, and the question becomes, what's going to make the world more dangerous, accepting that or bombing them?
I read often that the man in the street [or the souk?] in Iran is well-disposed to the US, it's just the maniacal mullahs that have it in for The Great Satan [that's us].
So, if the Iranians do develop a nuclear capability, and a delivery system, might it go a lot easier for all concerned [us, Israel, and the rest of the Middle East] if Iran possessed a moderate gov't, not one lead by religious crazies?
If that's the case, is there an argument here to encourage the more "moderate" [whoever they may be?] elements in Iranian society and the Iranian gov't to come to the fore? Which means we foment some sort of coup [I recommend against it, as it would be DOA because of it's associatiopn with the US] or, somehow, someway try to encourage political change in Iran in a moderate direction, one which might view use, if not possession itself, of a nuclear capability pointless and a waste?
I know it sounds like a dream, and I have no idea how to get from A to B of this idea, but every idea we seem to have here is really not too great.
coups usually, sooner or later, result in harder line, more nationalistic regimes.
I suspect that moderation is more likely to come from a nation having something to lose, usually something economic, and economic progress seems to depend on serious native committment. The Marhall Plan worked because it was financing technologically advanced economies that only needed capital. Giving 3rd worlders fish seems a waste, and teaching them to fish can be outright dangerous, as we find among the Saudis. I suspect that development of values has to be concurrent; that merely teaching people to use technically advanced systems isn't going to mean they appreciate appropriate limits on their use.
IMHO, responsibility normally and naturally precedes authority, and it's very likely that the best we can do is keep an arm's length from people who want no part of us.
for anything more than cut-n-run missions.
For that matter, we'd have to be pretty nuts to trigger a war there - we'd have 3 separate wars in contiguous states.
The way to stop this is of course draft Republican children.
I guess you could regard this as Republican population control.
Unless some sanity prevails among these neocons, we're slated to lose a good part of our army and/or our fleet in the Persian gulf.
if we think Iraq is uncontrollable - and I suspect that's a fair term - Iran would be many times worse.
If there's anything worse than trying to police foreigners with soldiers, it's trying to police them in terrain like Iran.
My bet is it won't happen for an obvious reason.Iran has the capability to retaliate through its' navy with missiles against the oil installations in Saudi arabia and adjoining states.I can't imagine that the oil interests would support him in such an endeavor.....
any surface vessels or even ground based missiles are exactly the sort of target that we've found so easy to knock out in Iraq.
As far as it's a metter of oil security, I think insurgency and civil instability is a far greater threat than any missile threat.
At some point in time, soon, some lunatic is going to push the button. It might be Bush doing a pre-emptive of cataclysmic proportion, it might be Ahmadinejad aiming at Tel-Aviv, it might be Israel pre-empting Iran, or Kim the Kook shooting a rocket at Seattle, or India and Pakistan nuking each other (it happened before, some 10-15 thousand years ago, according to some theories attributed to interpretations of the Indian Vedas).
and of course, there is no telling what could happen if al Qu'aida or Hamas or Jemaah Islamiah got their hands on ANY kind of a nuke...