The New Yorker has a new article from Seymour Hersh in which he examines the question: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb? Here’s his lead paragraph:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

Well, when Seymour Hersh talks, I listen. He has sources in the military and among the intelligence community that few other reporters can match. He has also invariably been proven right regarding his reporting, from our failure to capture Osama in Afghanistan to the torture and abuses of Abu Ghraib. What he has to say this time is truly chilling even if, after so many lies and so much warmongering by the Bush administration, it has lost its ability to shock anyone.

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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.”

[…]

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

It should be noted Iran has never invaded another country, and never used weapons of mass destruction. Does it support certain terrorist organizations in the Middle East? Yes, principally in Lebanon. But the same could be said about every single government in the Middle East. Indeed the biggest financial supporter of Al Qaida was our erstwhile friend and ally in the region, Saudi Arabia. To compare Iran to Nazi Germany (and by contrast, Bush to Winston Churchill) is to engage in a dangerous and misleading fantasy about the real threat Iran poses in the region and to our nation.

And it seems George Bush has learned nothing from the ongoing catastrophe that is Iraq. Wasn’t Iraq going to be his legacy? I suppose that since Iraq hasn’t turned out so well, it’s not exactly unexpected that Bush would go off in search of something else to pin his historical reputation on — but another war, and against Iran? A nation with a stronger military and greater potential to cause our forces in the region harm?

This messianic complex that Mr. Bush seems to possess in spades is frankly what makes him the most dangerous man on the planet. Wars are to be avoided, not pursued. Leaders that pursue the false glory that war offers are rightly condemned by history, not crowned with the laurels of “statesman” and “humanitarian.” Bush may fancy himself the New Age version of Winston Churchill, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Churchill warned against the aggression of the Nazis under Hitler, he didn’t wage aggressive war in return. Churchill rallied his country to fight on against a more powerful foe that had attacked and invaded other countries and threatened the invasion of England itself. He didn’t pre-emptively invade weaker nations on the pretext that they posed a threat to his own.

Indeed, Bush does resemble a certain World War II leader, but it certainly isn’t Churchill. I leave it to you to decide which past ruler to whom he should be compared.

As for the Hersh article: Go read the whole thing. It will be well worth the time you take today to absorb all of its implications. Indeed the most frightening of which is this:

One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.

But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.

“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.

The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.

“If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle,” the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.

Somehow, I doubt this is what Bush’s father meant when he talked about “a thousand points of light.”