If you haven’t yet read Sy Hersh’s newest New Yorker piece, you should get cracking. Sy has a lot of sources in this bad boy, and it ain’t pretty from the point of view of world peace. That’s because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have an insatiable lust for blood and yet have an insufficient amount of it circulating through their brains.
If you had any doubt the April Revolution (aka the Revolt of the Generals) was really about Cheney and Rummy’s desire to use a nuclear weapon on Iran, Hersh puts an end to it. It appears the dangerous duo’s only real allies for the BOMB IRAN STRATEGY are from the Air Force. The Air Force has always been the special preserve of frightening loons.
I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that’s been fed to them.- Curtis E. Lemay
Sounds kinda familiar. From Hersh’s article:
“Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And [Peter] Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ ”
Maybe it is because of their remove from the carnage they create, but Air Force Generals can be quite sanguine about destroying whole nations of people.
That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.- Curtis E. Lemay
They just don’t excel in the humanitarian department.
We should bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.- Curtis E. Lemay
Let’s remember that Lemay wanted to create Armageddon.
His first war plan, drawn up in 1949, proposed delivering “the entire stockpile of atomic bombs in a single massive attack” – dropping 133 atomic bombs on 70 cities within 30 days.
And during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he almost did:
That had also been the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff three days earlier. “This blockade and political action . . . will lead right into war,” Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force warned. “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”
It “would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this,” the general said. “And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.”
…We now know from Soviet documents that an American military attack would have been met with fierce resistance from local Soviet troops authorized to use tactical nuclear weapons against American forces on the beaches, at sea and in the air. Although we were less certain of that back in 1962, questions on our agenda nevertheless included the number of deaths from nuclear fallout in American cities.
Okay, enough about old Bombs Away Lemay. The point is that Air Force Generals tend to be more reckless than Army or Marine Generals. They also like to use their toys. So, I’m not surprised that they are allies of Cheney and Rumsfeld and that no Air Force generals joined in the April Revolution.
Some of Hersh’s description about the debate over bombing Iran is below the fold.
One complicating aspect of the multiple-hit tactic, the Pentagon consultant told me, is “the liquefaction problem”—the fact that the soil would lose its consistency owing to the enormous heat generated by the impact of the first bomb. “It will be like bombing water, with its currents and eddies. The bombs would likely be diverted.” Intelligence has also shown that for the past two years the Iranians have been shifting their most sensitive nuclear-related materials and production facilities, moving some into urban areas, in anticipation of a bombing raid.
“The Air Force is hawking it to the other services,” the former senior intelligence official said. “They’re all excited by it, but they’re being terribly criticized for it.” The main problem, he said, is that the other services do not believe the tactic will work. “The Navy says, ‘It’s not our plan.’ The Marines are against it—they know they’re going to be the guys on the ground if things go south.”
“It’s the bomber mentality,” the Pentagon consultant said. “The Air Force is saying, ‘We’ve got it covered, we can hit all the distributed targets.’ ” The Air Force arsenal includes a cluster bomb that can deploy scores of small bomblets with individual guidance systems to home in on specific targets. The weapons were deployed in Kosovo and during the early stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Air Force is claiming that the same techniques can be used with larger bombs, allowing them to be targeted from twenty-five thousand feet against a multitude of widely dispersed targets. “The Chiefs all know that ‘shock and awe’ is dead on arrival,” the Pentagon consultant said. “All except the Air Force.”
“Rumsfeld and Cheney are the pushers on this—they don’t want to repeat the mistake of doing too little,” the government consultant with ties to Pentagon civilians told me. “The lesson they took from Iraq is that there should have been more troops on the ground”—an impossibility in Iran, because of the overextension of American forces in Iraq—“so the air war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force.”
Yes, our civilian leadership is nuts and the Air Force is prepared to do their bidding. It’s the fluoridation, Mandrake.
Hat tip to rba for pointing me to the story.
