an attack on iraq with nuclear weapons is simply crazy, wacky batshit crazy. it will kill a lot of iranians and is virtually guaranteed to severely damage u.s. interests, by inflaming the muslim world, inflaming everyone else too, by panicking the international oil markets, by causing the shiites in iraq to turn their militias on u.s. forces, etc. on top of that, there's the simple absurdity of nuking a country to keeping nuclear weapons from being used.
chris albritton, however, has a good point, the fact that there are plans in the pentagon to attack iran, even an attack that involves using nukes, doesn't necessarily mean it will happen:
Now, the U.S. makes all sorts of plans. I'm sure there plans to nuke Canada or France mouldering away somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon. That doesn't mean they'll ever be dusted off and implemented. So the real question is not "Are we making plans to nuke Iran?" but "How likely is it that we will implement plans to nuke Iran?" A friend of mine who follows this stuff closely told me that he doesn't think Bush has the political capital or time to pull off an attack. As he says, the worst-case/most-likely scenario is that this is a real Bush plan that will never see the light of day after Cheney has little fantasies in the VP bathroom over it. Neo-con porn, in other words. The best-case/least-likely scenario is that this is a feint to convince the Israelis we mean business so they will keep their planes on the ground. Or, alternately, Hersh could be dead-wrong about the whole thing. Maybe he's just doing that thing he does of dangling sexy rumors with enough meat on them to make them interesting and then seeing what bubbles up to the surface after he's turned up the heat. It's a good reportorial strategy to shake things up.horatio is also reassuring. he notes that the president would probably go to congress to get authority to use force before he attacked iran. i should mention that bush, like every president in the past two decades, officially maintains that congressional authorization is not necessary. still, he did seek it before the iraq war. so if he's really following the iraq script so closely as many have claimed, that means he's gonna ask congress to pass a resolution. with a congressional election fast approaching and 58% of the public now saying the war in iraq is not worth fighting, it's gonna be a harder sell this time around than it was in 2002.
Or it might all be disinformation from the U.S. to get the Iranians to the table. Of course, there's no reason the buzz can't be all of these things and, frankly, that's pretty likely.
but if you want to be prepared for the worst, you can always get one of these signs.
