Color of Despair

Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker, has an update on Bush-Cheney plans for attack on Iran. There is a slow motion feel of inevitability about the whole thing, like watching the approach of a comet that will destroy the planet, looking on helplessly as this great disaster unfolds. Having utterly failed in Iraq, and having clearly strengthened both Iran and terrorism in the process, Bush and Cheney want only to dig faster and deeper.

A snippet:

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

That perception may be one reason that Democrats are unwilling to speak out against the oncoming attack, or, like Hillary, even vote for a resolution (Kyl-Lieberman) that enables it. Meanwhile, Republicans, having already sold their souls to this devil, or at least drunk deeply of the poisoned kool-aid, see little choice but to go down with the ship.

The other likelyhood is that Bush, in his "advice" to Hillary, has claimed that he needs this threat to intimidate Iran. Were could we have seen that device before?

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”

Why do they think it would end in twenty years? Far more likely, to me, is that Americans turn so decisively against the war that we flee in defeat, or, if we do win a long destructive war, wind up as a broken, exhausted nation, like Britain after WW II. Except that there won't be any US to offer a Marshall Program.

How can we hope to avoid it, if even Hillary and Obama refuse to speak out against it.?