Friday, January 12, 2007

Sliding Toward Insanity

I am more convinced than ever that the Bush Administration is trying to provoke a war with Iran (and perhaps Syria). Such a war, coming as it would in the midst of the Iraq catastrophe, would be a disaster of historic magnitude. Bush is not being advised by rational voices of any kind. All such people have been purged. He is, instead, surrounded by neocon fanatics baying for blood. Glenn Greenwald has taken note of a particularly perverse one, neocon Arthur Herman, who is demanding a massive series of military operations to destroy Iran's bridges, ports, and other facilities and seize its energy resources. Glenn's opinion of this is worth reporting:
The very idea that we are going to launch a unilateral bombing campaign against Iran, shatter its infrastructure, and then seize its oil assets is pure insanity of the highest order. There is no other way to describe that. And that would be true at any time, let alone when we are bogged down in the greatest strategic disaster in our nation's history, where our already horrendous position could be worsened immeasurably by Iran.
One feels absurd even dignifying Herman's "analysis" with a substantive response. It really is the stuff of the babbling prophet standing on a cardboard box in the 1980s version of Times Square.
But with the fate of our Iraq occupation sealed through the end of the Bush presidency, the most pressing question is whether the Leader will use the last two years of his presidency to provoke some sort of military confrontation with Iran, and people like Herman are not standing on boxes in Times Square where they belong, but instead are writing in Commentary, which continues to exert real influence among the radicals who have driven our country into the state it is currently in...
Read the whole post. And then resolve to take action.

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