War as a Game

I'm going to shamelessly crib from a great Digby post at Firedoglake here. The post features what can only be Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Strangelove. I squandered a good deal of time before finally succeeding in bringing in a similarly-minded pic.

But that other image is too good to miss, and an extra incentive to check out the original post.

Tristero's post over at my place from earlier today about General Peter Pace's divergence from the administration's talking points may illuminate some of the backchannel infighting going on in the Bush administration over Iran. Here's the nut:

A top U.S. general said Tuesday there was no evidence the Iranian government was supplying Iraqi insurgents with highly lethal roadside bombs, apparently contradicting claims by other U.S. military and administration officials.

Now, we don't know what this really means. It could be that they are playing some sort of elaborate good cop/bad cop routine. (God help us — these people are not very good at complicated tasks.) Or it could be a real revolt of the generals. We can't know for sure. But we do know that as much as a year ago, the administration has been actively planning to attack Iran and the generals have been resisting. Here's Seymour Hersh from April 2006:

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a
potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

I have believed for some time that the Bush administration is intent upon attacking Iran because they believe that their unpopularity will be redeemed by history for having taken great, bold steps to transform the middle east. The more Iraq looks like a cock-up of epic proportions that results in nothing more than chaos and death, the less likely it is that their "vision" will come to pass. And so they rely more and more on the "big" thinkers who set us on this path many years ago: the neoconservatives who cooked up a document for Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu years ago. A document called "A Clean Break", which many people, including Ambassador Joseph Wilson, have pointed to as the guiding document that took us first into Iraq — and now maybe Iran.

For those of you who may be foggy on the details, I would highly recommend that you read this very interesting neocon primer by Craig Unger in this month's Vanity Fair. It was, at one time, considered to be crazed moonbat conspiracy mongering to talk about "Clean Break." Today those of us who were writing about it prior to the Iraq invasion have been vidicated by events. We were not being hysterical then and we are not hysterical now:

[big clip]

That is the argument that's clearly driving Bush and Cheney today. They have nothing else. Cheney is melting down on national television. Bush in his bubble is as detached and oblivious as ever. I believe that we are at a point where the only things standing between us and the order to attack Iran are the generals. (Forget congress — they can't even pass a toothless resolution against the "surge" in less than a couple of months. The "surge" will have already failed by the time they even stage a uselss protest.) And that is about the scariest thing, out of many scary things, I've contemplated since the beginning of the Bush administration. We are now in a Strangelovian bizarroworld where we must count on General Buck Turgidson to refuse to follow orders. Holy Moly.