More
Matrix Masters
Blogs
World Events
US News
Science & Health
Earth News
Free Speech
News from Africa
News from Palestine
Bill of Rights Under Attack

Matrix Masters'
SUPPORTERS

Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

Bush Junta Planing to Begin World War III
(Andrew Stephen, New Statesman, 17 April 2006 )
There will be an attack; that much is already assumed in Washington. Whether it should be nuclear is a matter of intense debate. The verdict may depend upon the wild card of the president's Messianic "To me it would be a worse crime to stay silent if telling the truth could prevent war." . . . So the Third World War is imminent and the madman in the White House bunker is about to nuke Iran. . . . Washington is already working from the assumption that the US will launch some form of conventional-weapon attack on Iran during this presidency. That much is not news here. . . . Nuclear weapons, however, are another matter. Whether they might be used against Iran is a critical issue in the struggle under way between foreign-policy pragmatists and ideological zealots. Washington is divided between these two camps, of which the former is by far the bigger. It consists of sensible people inside the administration itself, the State Department, CIA, Pentagon and the powerful think-tanks, and its numbers are growing exponentially as the president's incompetence becomes undeniable to all but the most fanatical. . . . The second Washington faction is tiny, but unstable and dangerous. It consists of a tiny handful of people. . . . Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, attended by a dwindling band of neoconservatives, sit in their bunker, increasingly detached from reality, still insisting on viewing the world and plotting its course as they choose to do, unhindered by inconvenient realities. . . . The first faction overwhelmingly agrees with the British, French and German view that Iran must be isolated diplomatically rather than militarily, and it is solidly behind the tough UN Security Council statement of 29 March on Iran. Its members are terrified, however, that in the meantime the madmen in the bunker will lose it completely. . . . There are many, including people at the United Nations, who believe that Bush can and will press the nuclear button. Yet a clear majority in Washington believes that an all-powerful establishment, from the might of the top brass at the Pentagon to the consensus wisdom of practically every senior politician, will prevail against even an out-of-control president. . . . Disinformation from Mossad fuelled the US neo-cons' miscalculations over Iraq, and Israel has a clear interest in persuading Bush to strike first against a country that threatens to be a nuclear rival in the Middle East. It could be provoking the ideological struggle in Washington in the hope that the publicity itself might prove self-fulfilling. . . . Then I asked a former senior nuclear strategist with Nato about the practicalities of the US launching nuclear strikes against 400 separate sites, most of them underground, in Iran. His answer was blunt. "The only nuclear weapon that might penetrate a little before exploding is the B-61 bomb," he said. "If you penetrate a bunker, you create a Chernobyl. The fallout would spread all over the Middle East and who knows where else." There were too many targets, the Shias and Hezbollah would make Iraq even more hellish than it is, and the price of oil would immediately rise to more than $100 a barrel. . . . the Bush administration's denials over Iran sound horribly like its pre-2003 denials over Iraq. There are midterm elections coming up in November, he noted, and, although not all military men are right-wing hawks, not by any means, "Bush is a jackass who needs to prove his manhood". . . . Here we come full circle, back to the struggle being fought in Washington. The dominant view, including from the Pentagon, is that nuclear strikes against Iran would be disastrous, militarily and politically. Yet there remains the terrifying wild card of what Hersh so rightly calls Bush's Messianic complex.

posted by LoZo 6:30 AM