Outside the Spectrum

      So there's a lot of news in the past couple of days.

      First, what you expect: the new head of the EPA is just as bad as the preceding one.

      I really tire of having to point out the obvious to prove points to people. I remember in 2000 when I thought it was pointing out the obvious that George W. Bush was a ridiculously bad candidate for the presidency.

      This country need to be reminded of the obvious over and over and over again. This is one thing you must never forget: firing the help doesn’t change the leader. He just hires replacements that are as bad the people replaced, and he’s still the one making the big decisions anyway.

      Seymour Hersh has a major scoop, and that is that Bush “is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-busting nuclear bombs.”

      While most newspapers in this country dismiss airstrikes against Iran as a last resort, many journalists have been maintaining that the possibility of U.S. military action against Iran is hardly a distant one. Hersh is simply the most prestigious and recent one.

      Hersh has won a Pulitzer and five Polk awards. His most recent book, Chain of Command, is an excellent history of the U.S. “war on terror.” Hersh has been one of the top five journalists in the country over the last few years on reporting about international affairs and the war. When he writes something it’s no longer rumor, it’s official.

      Disaster. This presidency, this war, our foreign relations, our country: disaster. Utter ruin. Humiliation, bankruptcy, mutilation, death, hatred, protest, utter lawlessness.

      I am reduced to sentence fragment in describing this ongoing disaster of a presidency that is simply out of control like no other presidency has ever been. After the wonderful outcome in Iraq, our Executive Branch has decided that another war is a great idea.

      This is why Bush must be impeached, moderates, and I’m talking to you, Molly Ivins: every month he is left in office is literally a month of potential irreversible damage he will do to our democracy. Let him finish out his term and you can expect presidential pardons for Scooter and every other criminal under indictment in this administration.

      Beginning to dimly realize that his legacy will be one of lies, environmental destruction, deficits, tax relief for millionaires, war, torture, civilian casualties, and ruin, our president has decided on one more shot at glory, “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

      The diseased infrastructure in this White House includes war hawks and reprobates from the Reagan Administration: “William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration…Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security,” all signers of a panel’s report that nuclear weapons should be used “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.”

      In other words nukes should be a regular part of our arsenal, used whenever there’s a really important target we want to hit. Drop a dozen of them on Iran. No biggie.

      Reread that last statement. Our administration and the hawks in Israel put a lot of weight on the words of the head of Iran. Try weighing the above words with a similar weight. This is it, ladies and gentlemen. This is the kind of thinking that gets you involved in Vietnam and Iraq. This is the diseased worldview that sees the planet as a giant Risk board on which to play a military-political game to take over the world. In this demented world nuclear weapons are just another tool in your toolbox, war is just another tool in your toolbox, the truth is just another tool in your toolbox. Use one or all of them if you feel like it, you know, whatever’s convenient. Whatever serves your goals of rearranging sections of the world to your liking, installing friendly governments, opening up markets for economic exploitation, etc.

      What disturbs me is how casual these dimwits are about playing the war card, how casual they are about popping open that can of worms. What disturbs me is how ready to go off these guys are, how they frame their goals casually, like “the leader of Iran is crazy, he’s said some crazy things, he’s at the head of a dangerous faction in Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, we have to use war, diplomacy never works, etc.”

      These guys are myopic in the extreme, and dishonest even to themselves. I have yet to hear talk of invading North Korea. Oh, I forgot, North Korea isn’t at the heart of the world’s energy supply. I didn’t hear talks of the danger of weapons of mass destruction when the Pinochet regime was pursuing biological and chemical weapons. Oh, I forgot, fascist, despotic regimes with weapons of mass destruction are only an immoral danger when they aren’t allied to us.

      These guys are very willing to start another illegal pre-emptive war over nothing but Iranian nuclear ambitions and some loose talk from Tehran. Would that they had the same perspective in examining our actions in the world.

      There isn’t even a whisper of whether or not this is moral. There isn’t any consideration of what the blowback might be from bombing Iran, including Hezbollah terrorist attacks on American soil, southern/Shiite Iraq going up in flames, oil prices quadrupling and leading to world-wide recession, and the inevitable international condemnation, increase in terrorist attacks, and polarization of opinion in the Middle East that might lead to war involving Israel. There isn’t any consideration of world opinion, international law, or possible civilian casualties.