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Nuclear Apocalypse
www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601009_bushs_nuclear_apocalypse/
Posted on Oct 9, 2006
By Chris Hedges
Editor s Note: The former Middle East bureau chief for
The New York Times and author of the bestseller War Is
a Force That Gives Us Meaning reports on Bush s plan
for Iran, and how a callous war, conceived by zealots,
will lead to a disaster of biblical proportions.
The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the
guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile
destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS
Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News,
is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz
off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by
the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a
feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I
doubt it.
War with Iran a war that would unleash an apocalyptic
scenario in the Middle East is probable by the end of
the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as
three weeks. This administration, claiming to be
anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and
especially the Middle East, defined three states at the
start of its reign as the Axis of Evil. They were
Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has
nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do
not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have
ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott
Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and
illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles
the Middle East for the National Security Council. He
knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing
about the Middle East. He sees the world through the
childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them,
the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it
is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most
of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a
crisis of epic proportions.
These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a
doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a
slight corruption of Leon Trotsky s doctrine of
permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines
serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all
those classified as foreign opponents, to create
permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic
critics who challenge leaders in a time of national
crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States,
slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are
being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.
But this war
will be different. It will be catastrophic. It
will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in
the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And
there are those around the president who see this
vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president
himself may hold such a vision.
The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost
on those in the Middle East. Iran actually signed the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has violated a
codicil of that treaty written by European foreign
ministers, but this codicil was never ratified by the
Iranian parliament. I do not dispute Iran s intentions
to acquire nuclear weapons nor do I minimize the danger
should it acquire them in the estimated five to 10
years. But contrast Iran with Pakistan, India and
Israel. These three countries refused to sign the
treaty and developed nuclear weapons programs in
secret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear
weapons. The word Dimona, the name of the city where
the nuclear facilities are located in Israel, is
shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli
threat to Muslims existence. What lessons did the
Iranians learn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian
allies?
Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to
destabilize the Iranian regime by recruiting tribal
groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel,
given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what
must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other
countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi
Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclear
capacity, and given that, with the touch of a button
Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we expect from
the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps
that the doctrine of permanent war entails making
preemptive and unprovoked strikes.
Those in Washington who advocate this war, knowing as
little about the limitations and chaos of war as they
do about the Middle East, believe they can hit about
1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production
and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster
in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air campaign not
only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese
behind the militant group, is dismissed. These
ideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based
universe. The massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed
to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we
begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As
retired General Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed
out, once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter
of time before you have to put troops on the ground or
accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon.
And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise
missiles and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is
the choice that must be faced either sending American
forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile
guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation.
As a people we are enormously forgetful, Dr. Polk,
one of the country s leading scholars on the Middle
East, told an Oct. 13 gathering of the Foreign Policy
Association in New York. We should have learned from
history that foreign powers can t win guerrilla wars.
The British learned this from our ancestors in the
American Revolution and re-learned it in Ireland.
Napoleon learned it in Spain. The Germans learned it in
Yugoslavia. We should have learned it in Vietnam and
the Russians learned it in Afghanistan and are learning
it all over again in Chechnya and we are learning it,
of course, in Iraq. Guerrilla wars are
almost unwinnable.
As a people we are also very vain. Our way of life is
the only way. We should have learned that the rich and
powerful can t always succeed against the poor and less
powerful.
An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss
of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks
by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send
oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on
the domestic and world economy will be devastating,
very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The
2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority
in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan
and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling
allies. We will see a combination of increased
terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the
widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf.
Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit
for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the
first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.
The country, however, that will pay the biggest price
will be Israel. And the sad irony is that those
planning this war think of themselves as allies of the
Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could
see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a
regional war, one that would over time spell the final
chapter in the Zionist experiment in the Middle East.
The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program the
Samson option. The Biblical Samson ripped down the
pillars of the temple and killed everyone around him,
along with himself.
If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your
clothes left behind with the nonbelievers, then this
news should cheer you up. If you are rational, however,
these may be some of the last few weeks or months in
which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying
republic and way of life.
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