With friends like Pakistan...

You might be right about what you are saying about where the real threat is... But as shitty a campaign as we have run in Iraq, we would have brought an end to the world by attacking an unstable place with nuclear weapons.

 

Whenever I see Seymour Hersh's name in the TOC of the New Yorker I instinctively shit a brick. Less so now than right after 9/11. But the stuff he was reporting about the machinations of this administration made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. In the interest of full disclosure, I actually assumed a lot of the BS he was calling was the truth, but I also took the stance that Iraq didn't have nukes, was relatively weak, was a rogue nation with a dictator hurting his own people, and I wasn't going to lose sleep if we took him out. I was wrong. In fairness, I also assumed that we'd have competent analysts capable of predicting the ramifications of our actions and capable of planning and executing something that put an emphasis on the PLANNING -- something this giant-fuck has lacked and has been the root of many of the problems we are seeing. Perhaps if the analysis had been done correctly, we would have concluded that the competing factions in Iraq made it impossible to create a stable country in the wake of Saddam being brought down.

The reason I bring this up, a month or two, Seymour Hersh had another New Yorker article that got a bit less notice. I think people have become desensitized to him because nothing is shocking anymore. People expect this administration to do the wrong thing. But I took immediate notice. The short version of the story is that the administration is currently making up shit to create the basis for an invasion of Iran. And it is complete BS. All reasonable worldwide intelligent estimates conclude that they are NOT close to having a nuclear weapon. They are at least 5 years away and probably longer. Yet, if you listen to the rhetoric coming from Bush's people, you'd think they have Christopher Collet (17-year-old Paul Stevens in The Manhattan Project; anyone else remember this movie?) two days away from a fully-functional world-destroyer in some secret basement in Tehran.

And according to Hersh -- and even though I think he takes liberties, he is a hell of an investigative reporter with a crazy rolodex of people who will talk to no one else -- it is all BS. I was skeptical when he had an article a week after 9/11. My skepticism has been eaten away by experience.

I fear.