… yet everyone is cool and happy to ignore the fact. Didn’t I tell you the world was going mad?

July 25, 2005
Cheney’s Plan: Nuke Iran
Stand athwart the apocalypse, and shout: “No!”
by Justin Raimondo

A recent poll shows six in ten Americans think a new world war is coming: the same poll says about 50 percent approve of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Somewhat inexplicably, about two-thirds say nuking those two cities was “unavoidable.” One can only wonder, then, what their reaction will be to this ominous news, revealed in a recent issue of The American Conservative by intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi:

“The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing – that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.”

Two points leap out at the reader – or, at least, this reader – quite apart from the moral implications of dropping nukes on Iran. The first is the completely skewed logic: if Iran has nothing to do with 9/11-II, then why target Tehran? As in Iraq, it’s all a pretext: only this time, the plan is to use nuclear weapons. We’ll wipe out the entire population of Iran’s capital city because, as Paul Wolfowitz said in another context, “it’s doable.”

The other weird aspect of this “nuke Iran” story is the triggering mechanism: a terrorist attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11. While it is certain that our government has developed a number of scenarios for post-attack action, one has to wonder: why develop this plan at this particular moment? What aren’t they telling us?

I shudder to think about it.

[…]

Where oh where is the “mainstream” media on this? That’s a laughable question, because the answer is heartbreakingly obvious: they are nowhere to be found, and for a very good reason. As the Valerie Plame case is making all too clear, the MSM has been a weapon in the hands of the War Party at every step on the road to World War IV. It’s an Americantradition. As William Randolph Hearst famously put it to an employee in the run-up to the Spanish-American conflict of 1898:

“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”

Any objective examination of the Anglo-American media’s role as a megaphone for this administration’s “talking points” would have to conclude that the Hearst school of journalism has been dominant since well before the invasion of Iraq. Aside from the post-9/11 hysteria that effectively swept away all pretenses of a critical stance, the MSM was well acclimated to simply reiterating the U.S. government line on matters of war and peace all through the Clinton era, when friendly media coverage of the Balkans and numerousotherClintonianinterventions habituated the press corps to a certain mindset. By the time the Bush administration set out on a campaign of deception designed to lie us into invading and occupying Iraq, the MSM was largely reconciled to playing the role of the government’s amen corner.

With the U.S. and British media in the pocket of the PowersThatBe, what hope is there that the American people – who don’t believe anything if they don’t see it on television – will awaken to the danger in time? Again, in my more pessimistic moments, there doesn’t seem to be any such hope: television news seems firmly in the camp of the War Party, and the “mainstream” print media also doesn’t seem a likely venue for this kind of reporting.

[…]

Sort of reminds me of Rumsfeld’s idea of ‘world peace equals Armageddon‘ and ‘my nuke is bigger than yours‘.