Bomb, Bomb Iran

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New Yorker magazine. He has been reporting the inconvenient truth ever since uncovering the My Lai Massacre in 1969. He also wrote extensively about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He is now reporting that Bush and Cheney have ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to redraw plans for an attack on Iran and that the drum beating is intensifying. Bush has called Hersh's latest reporting "wild speculation" Why is it that when Bush tries to discredit a reporter, it lends that reporter more credibility? Decide for yourself - read Hersh's latest piece here.

Apparently, the Bush administration has decided that they can more easily sell lies about Iran's involvement in attacks on our forces in Iraq, than they would be able to sell the tired old lies about weapons of mass destruction. In other words they are going to concentrate on anti-terrorism propaganda, instead of counter proliferation propaganda.

Bush and Cheney have taken us into a strategically catastrophic position in Iraq. They now want to multiply this horrible mistake by a factor of ten. Their current thinking is that the American people and the international community won't freak out too much if they limit the strike to cruise missiles launched from our strike groups in the Persian Gulf, and limited Special Forces operations on the ground. But if we do this we will pay dearly.

Iran has a large faction of young, educated, secular, pro-western citizens, that can be turned into enemies by an action such as this. Bush's slogan "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" would be more accurate if he said "if we fight them over there we will soon have to fight them over here" If we strike Iran, they will certainly hit our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps they will fund terrorist attacks within the US. I can't imagine a better way to encourage terrorism. Our wars will expand throughout the middle east, over-stressing our already broken military, and making nuclear weapons look more like an option to the madman in the White House.

But the bright side to the nuclear option is that it will hasten the end of days and the second coming of the Lord. The righteous will be raptured up into heaven to sit by the side of their vengeful God. I'm afraid it doesn't look too good for the rest of us.

Impeachment looks like our best hope to me. Even if we don't succeed in removing Bush and Cheney from office, the effort seems like the best way to get the attention of the movers and shakers in both parties. We have to object in the strongest language possible to the violence being perpetrated in our name, and this is it.