• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Bush's bunch

Disagreeable

Well-known member
Entire article; link below.

"Reports that the Bush administration is considering a nuclear strike on Iran may not frighten the mad mullahs in Tehran, but it will scare the hell out of many Americans here at home.

It's hard to believe that with one military venture gone bad in Iraq and a world that now sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace, the Bushies would contemplate attacking a second nation, this time with tactical nukes. Which prompts two questions: Are these guys obsessed with a messianic sense of world mission that has robbed them of common sense? Or are they just plain nuts?

And the answers are yes and possibly so.

Some years ago, a Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey produced a Washington novel called "Seven Days in May" in which a cabal of Pentagon generals plans to depose the nation's civilian leaders and militarize foreign policy. It was a page-turner of a yarn. But they got it all wrong, for now we have the real thing -- and the seizure of power is by Bush civilians in the Pentagon, determined to ignore or overrule the more cautious instincts of the generals and militarize U.S. foreign policy.

Writing in the current issue of the New Yorker, Sy Hersh, perhaps the best investigative reporter of my time, recounts a conversation with a Pentagon adviser who worries about "a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians" -- the neoconservatives around Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, with Vice President Dick Cheney as their enabler, authored the misadventure in Iraq.

Some generals are considering resignation as a means of protest, the adviser told Hersh. It's "a juggernaut that has to be stopped," the adviser added.

What's fascinating about these neocons is their obsession with the use of force as old men when, as young men, many of them --notably Cheney -- managed to avoid service in Vietnam. In their youth, when it might have mattered for their country, they never fired a shot in anger. (In Cheney's case, considering his marksmanship, that was not all bad.)

The whole Iranian matter is fraught with awful irony and echoes of mistakes made in Iraq. Consider, for example, the irony of America inflicting a nuclear strike on the people of Iran in the name of stopping nuclear proliferation. Are the Bushies totally insensate? Or are they simply stupid?

Within hours of an American attack on Iranian nuclear sites, U.S. embassies across the globe would be under assault -- maybe even in flames -- and American tourists and diplomats and businessmen and women would have to run for cover. But how would Bush or Cheney or the civilian neocons in the Pentagon appreciate this possibility? They've lived lives immunized by privilege and draft deferments from the costs of war. The tragedy is that they've fallen heir to the greatest military power in history -- with no grasp of how to use it wisely.

There seems little doubt that the regime in Iran is led by theological fascists -- sane perhaps, but reckless. Our European allies, who live much closer to the Iranian threat than we do, are just as worried about the prospect of a nuclear Iran, maybe more. But they'll treat Bush as an international leper if he strikes Iran without United Nations sanction -- especially if he resorts to nuclear weapons.

Jack Straw, the Britain's foreign minister, said last year that a Western military strike on Iran would be "inconceivable." Europe is rightfully concerned about nuclear weapons in the hands of an Islamic regime in the grip of apocalyptic theological politics. But it wants no part of the Bush-Cheney desire for regime change in Tehran.

We're plagued in Iran by lousy intelligence, as we were in Iraq. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is, from all appearances, a certifiable loony, denying the Holocaust and pledging to "wipe Israel off the map." But he may not really be in charge. And it's hard to believe that the one thought to the real leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, would subject his people to sanctions, isolation, even a nuclear threat without privately pursuing every diplomatic avenue even as Ahmadinejad blusters.

Trouble is, the Bushies don't seem to know how to orchestrate the mix of diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, military threats and -- but only finally -- force. For example, they seem hell-bent on repeating the mistake they made in Iraq of not waiting for the International Atomic Energy Agency to reach a judgment on Iran's nuclear capacities and intentions.

It may be seen as surprising that the voices of reason and restraint in this Iran question, as Hersh reports it, are the generals. But it shouldn't be. After all, it was George Washington who warned against the dangers of a standing peacetime army, and Dwight Eisenhower who alerted us to the danger of the military-industrial complex. Having seen it, they know the horror of war.

And what about the neocons, our home-front heroes -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, the civilians they've recruited like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley -- who orchestrated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war and foreign regime change?

They should never again be allowed anywhere near the instruments and agencies of the American government.



John Farmer is The Star-Ledger's national political correspondent. He may be reached at [email protected]"


http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/farmer/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1145016306151840.xml&coll=1
 

Latest posts

Top