Text 18937, 105 rader
Skriven 2006-04-14 14:04:56 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: This says it all
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Bush's band of war-happy simpletons
Friday, April 14, 2006

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 jfarmer@starledger.com.


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