LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY fooltheworld)

Does Bush Think War with Iran Is Preordained?



The Christian right sees an apocalyptic nuclear war with Iran as avision set forth in the Bible. Bush himself may be a believer, too.

The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missilecruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missiledestroyer 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 shipswill be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be abluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power.But I doubt it.

Warwith Iran -- a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in theMiddle East -- is probable by the end of the Bush administration. Itcould begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claimingto be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especiallythe Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as "theAxis of Evil." They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which,because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who donot take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twistedpathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate thedisastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles theMiddle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing aboutCentral America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees theworld 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 arebarreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.

These menadvocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R.Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky's doctrine ofpermanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the samefunction, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreignopponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silencedomestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. Itworks. The citizens of the United States, slowly being stripped oftheir civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over acliff.

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 aroundthe president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, thepresident himself may hold such a vision.

The hypocrisy of thisvaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in the Middle East. Iranactually signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has violated acodicil of that treaty written by European foreign ministers, but thiscodicil was never ratified by the Iranian parliament. I do not disputeIran's intentions to acquire nuclear weapons nor do I minimize thedanger should it acquire them in the estimated five to 10 years. Butcontrast Iran with Pakistan, India and Israel. These three countriesrefused to sign the treaty and developed nuclear weapons programs insecret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. Theword "Dimona," the name of the city where the nuclear facilities arelocated in Israel, is shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadlyIsraeli threat to Muslims' existence. What lessons did the Iranianslearn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies?

Given thatwe are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regimeby recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel,given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done tothe Iranian regime, given that other countries in the Middle East suchas Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclearcapacity, and given that, with the touch of a button Israel couldobliterate Iran, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this,the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entailsmaking "preemptive" and unprovoked strikes.

Those in Washingtonwho advocate this war, knowing as little about the limitations andchaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can hitabout 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production andcripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster in southern Lebanon,where the Israeli air campaign not only failed to break Hezbollah butunited most Lebanese behind the militant group, is dismissed. Theseideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based universe. Themassive 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, onceyou begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you haveto put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to doin Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missilesand iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must befaced -- either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protractedand futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation.

"As apeople we are enormously forgetful," Dr. Polk, one of the country'sleading scholars on the Middle East, told an Oct. 13 gathering of theForeign Policy Association in New York. "We should have learned fromhistory that foreign powers can't win guerrilla wars. The Britishlearned this from our ancestors in the American Revolution andre-learned it in Ireland. Napoleon learned it in Spain. The Germanslearned it in Yugoslavia. We should have learned it in Vietnam and theRussians learned it in Afghanistan and are learning it all over againin Chechnya and we are learning it, of course, in Iraq. Guerrilla warsare almost unwinnable. As a people we are also very vain. Our way oflife is the only way. We should have learned that the rich and powerfulcan't always succeed against the poor and less powerful."

Anattack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil,coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in thePersian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. Theeffect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, verypossibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites inSaudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities inBahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindlingallies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks,including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oilproduction in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become adeath pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the firsttime, unite against their foreign occupiers.

The country,however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel. And the sadirony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies ofthe Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could see Israeldrawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a regional war, one that wouldover time spell the final chapter in the Zionist experiment in theMiddle East. The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program "the Samsonoption." The Biblical Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple andkilled everyone around him, along with himself.

If you are sureyou will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left behind with thenonbelievers, 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 toenjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying republic and way of life.

Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."

I see no reason to doubt that Bush believes this way. My mother has often told me that there is "no point" to wishing for or working towards world peace because the Bible says it will never happen. I just don't understand how they jumped from war being prophesied to thinking that they needed to fulfill the prophecy themselves.