<p>Seymour Hersch of the New Yorker has a recent article about BushCo.'s plans to bomb Iraq. The proliferation of nuclear power in Iraq is a threat to our security and needs to be dealt with but this boy president with the Messianic complex aided and abetted by the neocon cabal is not up to the job. This is scary. Read it. </p>
<p>Random Excerpts:</p>
<p>"A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do, and that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.</p>
<p>This is much more than a nuclear issue, one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. Thats just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.</p>
<p>“The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe its the way to operatethat the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.”</p>
<p>“ Force protection is the new buzzword, the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagons position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran, he said. We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”</p>
<p>I would hope that any administration has a variety of scenarios working at any given moment. Isn’t that their job – to plan for possible events? I also doubt that people who are close to the decision makers are spilling the beans through The New Yorker.</p>
<p>Sad to say, it’s a done deal.
The administration views Iraq as a success, and looked at from their vantage point of control of the country for strategic purposes, the building of permanent bases and the contracts for all rebuilding, it is. Now, time to move on to the next venue.<br>
Only this time, Americans are going to feel it. And not just our brave military families. All of us. jmo</p>
<p>Correction to my post since I missed the chance to edit - I meant Iran not Iraq in my first paragraph.</p>
<p>And just what is Seymour Hersch’s agenda? </p>
<p>It is their job to plan for possible events but it’s not their job to fudge the facts to justify wars. </p>
<p>I don’t doubt for one minute that people close to the facts would spill the beans to Seymour Hersch - the first time around, Bush was given the benefit of the doubt. Enough time has passed to see how the Bush administration treats whistle blowers and those who disagree.</p>
<p>Hersh protects his sources. That’s what he was referring to in your other quote about changing names,places to “protect people.” If people are afraid of another Iraq, or of world war III, of course they would talk to him.
I only hope more come out, and don’t wait until it’s too late, like Colin Powell just has… 5 years after the fact is a little late to say, well yeah, I knew the rationale was trumped up all along.
Hersh actually has a pretty good record of getting the scoop right.</p>
<p>I expect that Bush/Cheney don’t think they need their approval.
They have the numbers in both Houses to do pretty much whatever they want, however.</p>
<p>According to this quote it sounds like they are trying to find ways around House or Senate approval, " Force protection is the new buzzword, the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagons position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight."</p>
<p>Everything is justifiable when you are continually at war.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the article but on past track record, I have some reservations about Hersh’s credibility and accuracy.</p>
<p>That said, an impending attack on Iran would not surprise me. I have been a fly on the wall to discussions about log trails, threats and counters to the Iranians closing the straits of Hormuz by sinking a well-placed tanker or three, special forces already operating in-country, bunker-busting munitions (though no tactical nukes), uranium enrichment rates in various configurations of cascades of uranium gas centrifuges, etc.</p>
<p>What is totally absent from these not-official-but-fairly-well-informed discussions are the same types of factors not discussed in the run-up to Iraq: the political/economic/ethnic/religious. There seems to be an implicit assumption that because the jingoistic religious hardliners in power in Iran (hey, I don’t like the ones in power in this country, either) aren’t well liked, that any action will be greeted positively by most of the Iranian people. Shades of being greeted with flowers, Achmed Chalabi, et alia.</p>
<p>The whole thing has the air of hurrying on to created a new mess before cleaning up the current mess. Most damning, no one seems to give a first thought, let alone a second, to the effect of an attack on Iran upon the Shiite factions in Iraq, particularly SCIRI and Muktada al-Sadr’s people. There’s a strong possibility that an attack on Iran will make Iraq a living hell for American troops. And our supply lines to Baghdad/Anbar/points north, where the Sunni resistances is strongest, all run through the Shiite dominated South.</p>
<p>Given the current situation in Iraq, the whole idea of moving on to Iran is deeply disturbing to me.</p>
<p>Although Bush spearheaded the move into Iraq, virtually everyone of our elected representatives voted in support of the war. This was considered the patriotic thing to do at the time.</p>
<p>Now I would hope that support for further military action would not necessarily be welcomed or seen as inevitable by others whose approval is necessary to proceed. After all, Bush’s approval ratings are at an all time low, and it should be possible for a dissenting voice to speak out and be heard.</p>
<p>Oh, he just doesn’t like democratically elected governments.</p>
<p>The assassinations against Chavez have failed. New left governments being elected in Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and the list is getting longer. Iraq is going badly. Katrina debacle. Abramoff - more is coming. The wagons are circling to deal with the Libby stuff. Folks don’t like being spied upon. Berlesconi - the U.S. biggest ally in Europe - will soon be gone. Oil prices spiking - and will go much higher, as Venezuela diverts oil originally targeted for the U.S. to India. </p>
<p>It’s time to go after folks who wear turbans.</p>
<p>My goal in life is to join politics so that the US gets a taste of their own medicine. I am sick of the bullying. Its time for people to stand up for what they believe in.</p>
the US has no nuclear bunker busters since Congress decided not to fund their development, I’d have to accept that this is at best inaccurate and certainly an exaggeration. The author’s been pretty far off the truth in the past, too. I do respect that some here will not weigh my opinion very heavily.</p>
<p>That said, I have to agree that nothing is going to stop Iran from going forward with their nuclear program and that constitutes a major failure on the part of international dipolmacy. This is the option people spoke of us needing to take with Iraq and it’s failure here hardly adds to teh credibility of those who argued for it then.</p>
<p>The unsurprising bad news is that I honestly believe that there are few other countries that are serious about this, so international support for action will come from only a very few players and you can probably guess which ones. Well, with some exceptions since most of Europe is on board in this case. With the news that Iran has essentially required Russia and China to promise to oppose force in exchange the latest round of oil and gas purchases, the UN, as typical will remain inert and useless on the issue.</p>
<p>An Iran with nuclear weapons, certainly an Iran with this government, would be a huge destabilizing force in one of the most important regions of the world. The US probably does need a back up plan if the diplomacy fails (OK, when) and, frankly, we need the resolve to do something about it or we should learn to not talk tough until we mean it. Military options should be a remote, last resort. </p>
<p>BTW, I disagree completely with the assertion that there’s nothing Iran can do to convince us that they’re abandoning their nuclear program. Admittedly their credibility is shot as they couldn’t have gotten as far as they have as quickly unless they were cheating all along, but nuclear programs are easier to monitor that chemical or biological weapons programs. They’d need to show serious cooperation with th IAEA to be convincing, though.</p>
<p>If his mission is to bring peace to the mid-east, this makes no sense. If his mission is to continue the rise of oil company profits…it starts to make sense. Who do you think this President really represents?</p>
<p>The good news is that Bush talks to God, the bad news is that Cheney and the oil industry are that god.</p>
<p>This will pretty much be the rationale for the next war. Except that while this poster really believes that military options should be the last resort, I don’t believe our administration does, regardless of what they may say. They’ll wait awhile and go through some of the motions, but our saber rattling of the last few months, years, actually, as well as the well-known desires of the neocons to control the middle east, makes it very hard to imagine that they want anything but a military take-out.</p>
<p>Perhaps the real difference is that while I believe military options should be a last resort, I still believe they should be a resort. This is a real case of there’s no way for the Administration to win. If they attack, they didn’t let diplomacy take its course. If they don’t and Iran demonstrates a nuclear weapon, they were indecisive.</p>
<p>I’m curious. How many here have college age children (just kidding). Isn’t one of our greatest fears that they will become addicted to serious drugs? </p>
<p>Suppose you discover they are. You try diplomacy only to discover that they’re breaking their promises and have gone futher down the road and things are getting worse. When do you decide to take serious action? Is there a bright line, a perfectly right or wrong time? Or do you just have to make a decision and hope you’re doing the right thing.</p>
<p>That’s sort of what we’re facing here. Iran has lied and cheated and pretty much used the diplomatic process to buy time to do what they wanted and are pretty far down the road and things are getting worse. Deciding what to do will not be easy and Lord knows the decision will be second guessed for decades regardless what it is. </p>
<p>And we’ll never really know if it was right or not. That’s how history works after all. Even Neville Chamberlain could have been right. Shame he wasn’t.</p>
<p>“Iran has lied and cheated and pretty much used the diplomatic process to buy time to do what they wanted and are pretty far down the road and things are getting worse.”</p>
<p>Sounds to me like you are describing the U.S. policy in Iraq.</p>