Bush & His Persian Carpet Bombing

“I’ve told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III,” said the President. “It seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” W, in a recent press conference.

It's all there. The bellicosity, the imprecision, the condescension and most of all, the illiteracy. One might think, if you're interested in avoiding World War III, that you might choose to speak about such a decisive subject, just for once, with carefully chosen words that communicate the exact meaning of your statement. Not this guy, not even when talking about World War III.

Most Americans are so interested in avoiding World War III that they can't wait for Bush's term to be over. Even with declining rates of literacy in this country, most of the populace is aware that stating that Iran should be prevented "from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon" means Bush thinks the bombing of Iran should already have commenced. The only way to prevent Iranian scientists from have the knowledge is to kill them all now, because the science of nuclear fission in a bomb is freely available. Actually constructing a bomb is the difficult part, but any country which undertakes the problem and which has an advanced academic and scientific infrastructure can get there. Iran fits the description. So many countries have succeeded in "have the knowledge" that scientific consultants abound throughout the world whose services are available on the open market. A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani father of the A-bomb, ran a kind of nuclear mail-order business for a while, until Musharraf placed him under "house arrest" to mollify Bush's mild protests about proliferation.

If Bush orders a bombing war against Iran, several things are going to happen. The first is that all hell is going to break loose. It is impossible to guess just how messed up things will get, but another war, the third war in six years or so which Bush has ordered against a country from which none of the 9/11 hijackers originated, will unleash a horror of chaos and death. On that we can rest assured. Another thing that will happen is that the United States will never be remotely the same again. A war against Iran, in the current state of wall-to-wall conflagration in the Middle East and South Asia, will cross a Rubicon of fate. I think ultimately it will be seen as Bush's cognate to Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, the decision to attack the Soviet Union while Germany was already heavily engaged in the occupation of Western Europe and North Africa. Financially, militarily and spiritually, the United States will pass a horizon of viability, and then just as rapidly as the war was commenced, we will undergo a sudden contraction and implosion. The process will be turbulent and unpredictable, but I don't think the USA will be recognizable in its current form when we're done. A finished police state? A road warrior nightscape of primitive barbarity? Dissolution into warring regions? All are distinct possibilities.

I suppose Cheney is the guiding force behind all this. I saw a picture of Cheney sleeping through a briefing on the California wildfires. There were the usual barbs: it wasn't about war, so he wasn't interested, etc. We're not a terribly astute country, in many ways, and I didn't read anywhere the actual reason. Dick Cheney has a concretized vascular system. When he sits still, the pinhole apertures of his carotid arteries block the flow of oxygenated blood to his brain, he becomes hypoxic, and he nods off. In addition to his quadruple bypass and numerous heart attacks, and the insertion of a defibrillating pacemaker in his chest, Cheney has undergone popliteal surgery (behind the knees) to clear the femoral arteries, and numerous other cardiac procedures. He's grossly overweight and living on borrowed time. And this is the man who urges that the living, those whose lives may still be all before them, commence the final, epic battle of civilization. What a strange pass we've come to.