Yesterday, I suggested that a bombing campaign against Iran would satisfy the Bush administration need for vindication of their foreign policy delusions without requiring another messy ground war and occupation. Today, Agence France Presse reports that the April 17 issue of The New Yorker magazine carries a story on US plans for a massive bombing campaign against Iran, possibly including the use of nuclear weapons.

The New Yorker story, written by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, says the administration think “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.”

AFP paraphrases Hersh as saying that “Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.”

Hersh’s story adds to fears expressed by centrist foreign policy analyst Joseph Cirincione, which I commented on here, and others who believe the Bush administration are perfectly capable of attempting to top the enormous strategic blunder they committed in Iraq by attacking Iran. But Hersh’s story will go beyond chatter to detail actual policy and planning machinations within the White House and Pentagon.

The story also adds significance to news of Pentagon plans to detonate a .6 kiloton bomb in a test, codenamed “Divine Strake,” to be carried out in the Nevada desert. The Pentagon says the test is aimed at exploring the effectiveness of non-nuclear bunker-busters, but taken in tandem with the revelations from Hersh, the size of the bomb — 700 tons, many times the capacity of even our largest cargo planes to deliver — suggests instead that the military are using it to circumvent the ban on nuclear testing. (We talked about Divine Strake in conjunction with British attempts to foment anti-Iranian sentiment in the UK, here.)

The details of Hersh’s story as described by AFP ring true; for one, Saddam was often compared to Hitler in the runup to the Iraq invasion. The comparison was obscene and overblown then and even more so now: Iran’s Ahmadinejad has nowhere near the absolute authority enjoyed by Hitler and Saddam, and unlike Nazi Germany and Iraq, Iran has no history of military aggression against its neighbors and, absent a threat from the US, no compelling reason to adopt a militant posture now.

Objections from skeptics regarding the possibility of a US attack on Iran generally arise from one or both of two mistaken assumptions: first, that an attack on Iran is precluded because it would involve heavy use of US ground forces, which simply aren’t available; and second, that the Bush administration have learned humbling lessons from the invasion of Iraq. But as I have repeatedly said, it wouldn’t and they haven’t. It appears, rather, that at least some of them have sunk so far into delusion that they seriously believe a massive bombing attack on Iran would, as I jokingly suggested yesterday, cause the Iranian public to rise up and embrace the US.

One of the major disappointments arising from the marketing of the war on Iraq is that not a single one of the senior administration, intelligence or military officials who knew full well that the invasion was likely to result in disaster had the courage to stand up, resign and go public with their concerns. I don’t know if that would have stopped the war, but it would at least have put a speed bump in the path of the administration’s marketing effort and the wholesale embrace of it by the press.

Now, astonishing as it seems, the administration are seriously considering an even more dangerous blunder with even more serious consequences. If ever there were a time for government and military officials to put country above career, and if ever there were a time for the press to do their goddamned jobs, this is it. I don’t know if there is in fact any way short of what would amount to a counter-coup to prevent a president who considers himself the supreme authority on national security from going to war, but at some point we’ll no longer have the opportunity to find out.

Bookmark and Share

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BuddyMarks BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea del.icio.us

Digg diigo DotNetKicks DropJack dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com Furl Google

Hugg Jamespot Jeqq Kaboodle kirtsy linkaGoGo LinkedIn LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace MyWeb

Netvouz Newsvine oneview OnlyWire PlugIM Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy Slashdot Sphere

Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Twitter Webride Windows Live Worlds Movies Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

 If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™