I have read essentially the same warning at least two other times during the past couple of months (one by Ray McGovern--Veteran Intelligence Officers for Sanity and another by Scott Ritter--former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq).  And now Chris Hedges, whose books I have found so insightful is saying the same thing.  Each time it comes up I feel a little sick to my stomach.  I agree with Concerned:  It is a little too apocalyptic to be believed.  But when people whom I respect and who have turned out to be correct in their assessments of so many of the crazy things this administration has done, I set up and listen.
I just did a Google News search using “US attack Iraq” and received a large number of references to news articles saying similar things. 
My question is what can we do?  Has anyone heard anything about this from any political figure of national stature?  This will not be seen as a real possibility to Americans until we spur a person that can command media attention to stand up and raise the alarm.

I just hope the Decider is indecisive!

There is no provocation from Iran as this writing. If Iran has a bomb or two, is it a real threat to the US? After all, we have hundred times more nukes than Iran and we have the delivery system, Iran does not.

What’s the urgency to launch war? I really would like to know.

Look at a map of the region.  Look at the borders of Iran.  Assume the ultimate military target is Iran.  Which countries border Iran?  Which were friendly to the US prior to the war?  If you wanted to cut off Iran from Syria, which country do you need control?

My opinion is that Bush regime’s target has always been Iran and the Caspian Sea region.  Therefore, it was necessary to establish a US military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  Now that the frist stages of the mission are accomplished, for the first time in history, the US has a shot at controlling the Caspian Sea resources, and Iran is the key to this strategy. 

Of course, the assumption that Iraq would be a cake-walk was incorrect.  The only way, at this point, to defeat the Iranian army and avoid a draft in the US is to use tactical nukes against Iranian forces.

I think we truly are standing at the gates of Hell.  When you realize that “influencing, knowing, dissenting, participating—all are important to a democratic life, but not one of them carries with it the authority to decide, the power to be in charge” it is hard not to abandon all hope.  The grim, horrible reality is that the People of the United States are not longer in charge.  God help us.

Mr. Hedges, before you compare Bush’s policy of permanent war and Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution, please read Trotsky. I can see why the war criminal Kissinger would praise your article.

The crazy neo-cons’ power is awesome beyond belief, and that’s the problem with being a super-power. Any crazy bunch of suicidal maniacs can take over the executive branch, promote a “unitary executive”, bully and threaten the legislative branch into compliance, and use war making as an investment opportunity. Religious implications don’t matter to the Carlyle Group. Nuclear bomb-making and mine manufacturing DOES matter, no matter the consequence.

It’s crazy. All of it. It’s crazy because it’s suicidal. Unchecked capitalism only has one endgame: destruction of the Earth as a place to live.

Barry Commoner wrote this in the late 1970s: Capitalism and Environmentalism do not and can not co-exist. Capitalism has to be regulated by factors that reflect the overall welfare of the nation, and of the planet. Without regulating capitalism, it simply overtakes everything. It has no compassion, no “public interest.” Massive deaths, genocide, and war are governed by the profit motive, by the “cost-benefit analysis”, not by loftier notions of “human rights” or of “Constitutional guarantees”, or of “Environmental Protections.”

What we’re beginning to witness, people, is the ultimate expression of unbridled capitalism: War for Profit, managed by the War Profiteers themselves.

While this may be a bit apocolyptic for some (re: 27781’s post), we must acknowledge that we live in a dark and grave time in American history.

Our right to speak freely is being removed, Habeus Corpus is dying, and torture is legal. What has our nation become? We are sliding into a dictatorship, with this dictator being accountable to no one.

I do fear that, if we begin this war with Iran, that we will suffer greatly. It will begin with our troops in the Middle East. The troops in Iraq will be slaughtered, both by missiles from Iran and from the massive uprising that will take place in Iraq. Our ships at sea are nearly defenseless and two fleets (the Enterprise is still there) may well be decimated.

That won’t be the end. American credibility, what is left of it, will be destroyed. North Korea will know that there is no one to militarily oppose them. Nations will be emboldened to attack Israel, despite the nuclear deterrent.

At home, this nation will be thrown into a revolt. We are already as polarized as a nation can be, and throwing in another war and a military debacle in the Middle East, and we will have fighting in our own streets. Sound like science fiction? I don’t think so. Dubya and his inner circle are convinced that they are the saviors of all that is good and free, which means white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Worse, our Congress is in league with this man, voting to give away our liberties.

Another poster mentioned that this would destroy the current pattern of civilization as we know it. I agree. Our only hope for the short-term is to impeach Mr. Bush. As it is, assuming he does no more harm, we will already need two decades to recover from this Administration. I fear things may grow much worse in the coming months.

Dear Sirs:
The author and the editors should picture the smoking ruins of Nagasaki stretching on to the horizon. Instead, they give us a photo associating Iran with nuclear missles, which according to all reports of foreign journalists, don’t exist, and, according to our own CIA, couldn’t exist for years to come. Honest journalism begins at home.
And why drag Trotsky into an article supposedly decrying a “1984” scenario? Anyone who has read further than The New York Times knows well that Trotsky discussed the economic and social distortions of backward countries caused by imperialist domination. He observed that representative democracy had been achieved by a rising capitalist class in competition with the remanents of feudalism. In those times,the allies of the capitalists were the middle classes, tradesmen, the peasantry and workers all arrayed against a corrupt and stifling aristocracy. In contrast, 20th century capitalism was fully developed on a global scale, and the imperialists were making alliances with the fuedal tyrannts of the backward countries. This crippled the native capitalists and made the development of democracy impossible except through the victorious struggle of the working class. No theory of Trotsky ever advocated or suggested a state of permanent war, or anything of the sort.

The last messenger has asked the lord to not destroy his people like he did to other people, but He said you will destroy yourselvs, I believe a change over will happen in 18 years where we will see law and order, and everthing is possible before 2024, people will fight very hard til the evil force completlly disapears, more lucky things will happen as has been Prophiesed, when the evil force trys to use all that bombs availbale to them, the Good forces will say *allahu akbar* and then it will go back to them and kill them, because the lord never wrongs his pious people, so I warn all the pious people to leave Nuclear owning nation because it will only destroy them and God is able to do all things that is easy for him he only says “be” and it comes to reality, I advise all the Nuclear owning nations to not kill their own people instead of trying to kill pious humans, they builded the Nuclears to destroy themselves, and God plas swifftly, All I can say is many things will happen before 2024 and after that will we will see law and order and which will be just like paradise, things are getting better,

I just read the phrase “Dunkirk in the Desert”. Retired General Barry McCaffrey coined it. What will happen when we attack Iran? We might kiss our 180,000 troops in the Middle East good bye.  We could never maintain those forces at the end of a 1000 mile shipping lane next to Iran followed by 600 miles of overland transport through Iraqi shiite territory. Stalingrad comes to mind. A whole army lost at the end of an impossibly long supply line through the idiocy of a sick leader.
Since I have those dark thoughts, I can only comfort myself with the idea that this is the only way for the American people to progress. Just like Germany and Japan had to be defeated catatrophically before the population stopped being obnoxious killers, so will the United States have to go down in flames, before those Christian morons will be put in the dustbin of history.
Too bad. I am having a nice life now.

Chris has it exactly right.

For very good coverage of Iran, war, and the truth check out Iran Information Agency

http://iraninformationagency.blogspot.com

As a Vietnam veteran I never thought an American president in the future would commit a foreign policy debacle that rivaled LBJ’s quagmire in Vietnam. Of course, I was wrong. The intellectually shallow neocons within the Bush administration whose cups runneth over with hubris, such as Eliott Abrams, are chillingly reminiscient of the New Frontiersmen in the LBJ administration, who stayed on after JFK’s assassination to prosecute the Vietnam War. So I find Chris Hedges’ column on the coming war with Iran to be within the realm of reality rather than a feverish jeremiad of apolycaptic prophecy.
As Dr. Polk noted in Hedges’ article, we are a nation that conveniently employs a selective remembrance of our past. Or as Gore Vidal has noted long ago in one of his essays, we live in The United States of Amnesia.
The internal dynamics of the invasion and occupation of Iraq have completely spun out of control by the major players both here in the Bush administration and the sectarian militias outside the Green Zone over there. Yet President Bush still clings to a slender thread of self-righteousness that he will be vindicated by historians twenty or thirty years from now. If that isn’t an indictment of his self-delusion in face of reality, given the day by day damning news reports coming out of Iraq, I really don’t know what the definition of self-delusion is. Yesterday there was a mass poisoning of Iraqi national policemen. That reminds me of my tour of duty in Vietnam, when I thought that I had just heard the worst news possible only to hear another incident that was even more horrific than the previous day’s.
That is what’s so disturbing about President Bush and his administration officials. They seem to be completely oblivious to the reality on the ground in Iraq and the Middle East. Nothing seems to deter them from pursuing their self-defeating policies.
Unfortunately, it will be the average American citizen and voter who will have to suffer the consequences of the disaster in the Middle East. If Iran is subjected to a sustained air campaign, there will eventually be a land invasion by American forces, as retired General Wesley Clark has pointed out. But, of course, the $64,000 question is: Where will the United States government find the necessary troops to prosecute this land war in a country that is three times larger than Iraq with a population of 70 million citizens, who will certainly lay aside their political differences to fight against the invaders?  (That’s a lot of cannon fodder for the Iranian clerics to throw at the American soldiers.) Not with members of an all-volunteer army, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. So an air campaign against Iran certainly implies a resumption of a national draft. That’s when the proverbial “merde” will hit the fan back in the United States. Then we will all see how ardently the liberal hawks and neocons within the Beltway feel about fighting in a war rather than having a detached and cerebral discussion on the sidelines while engaging in meaningless talking points about war on their blogs. And I am sure that the same class of elites who supported the Vietnam War yet avoided the national draft will once again find a way out of the meat-grinder of a land war in Iran. And I really want to avoid having working-class and middle-class men and women to make such perilous and life-threatening decisions about their lives.
I served as a medical corpsman and each day I saw the human face of war in the wounded American grunts, Vietnamese national and even wounded VC guerillas. So war is not some abstract, intellectual entity but a visceral, concrete experience. War is the abridgement of hope for the future. I still remember looking into the eyes of the wounded patients on the ward and seeing tombstones. I really can not fathom, let alone understand how a fellow American, no matter what his and her political and religious beliefs are, to be in favor of war only as a last, desperate option.
I got a really sick feeling in my gut prior to the invasion of Iraq. Even among the working-class people that I came into contact on a daily basis, most supported the war and believed the cherry-picked intellence on WMD and links to Al Queda. They told me I was living in the past and that I even was unpatriotic, which I found rather humorous because the most fervent attackers were the very citizens in my age group that avoided the draft. I would try to explain to them that wars always sip out of control along unforeseen alleys and avenues that metastasize like a cancer spreading from the original site of infection throughout the body.
I am just besides myself as I look around my city in the industrial rust belt and across the nation. I no longer recognize this country, my fellow citizens, our political leaders. There seems to be a deep undercurrent of malaise and drift throughout this country that even exceeds my memories of the Vietnam Era. This personal awareness that I feel down in my gut is even now hard for me to admit. It is as if since my return from Vietnam, I have been in an isolated and self-imposed exile from my country. We seem to be a nation of sleepwalkers slowly but clearly heading toward the abyss.
So it is with almost a sense of relief, the things I carry throughout my life have been a heavy burden for me, that I can come across a writer such as Chris Hedges, who wrote the best war memoir since Michael Herr’s “Dispatches.” But he is a lonely voice in the wilderness.

A carrier force in the Persian Gulf is a sitting duck. Silkworm missiles are very diffacult to defeat.

What in the world are people thinking ...?
especially the Bush Administration - no one wins in a religious war! And,if the war is nuclear, not only does no one win, EVERBODY DIES!! Now is the time for the people of the United States to pull together and get the Bush Administration out of office immediately.Before he committs the US to something that will, sooner rather than later, kill us all.Bush is the typical ultra, ultra religious fanatic, he believes that the ONLY religion is christianity (old testament)and all others should be subjugated to this way of belief. Sound familiar??? The same thinking as the Isralis & Muslims. One is as bad as the other. End the final analysis ...if allowed to continue - they will kill each other (and us). And God can start all over again with the human experiment.

We have only one chance of showing our horror at the possible war with Iran.  Pass the word, sound the alarm, the day we bomb Iran close down the country with a total general strike.

27781 is correct.  The fact of war for profit seems to be escaping the American people.  Capitalism has a very large ‘create a market’ sector that has been honed to a fine edge.  If you make soap, you encourage people to believe they are dirty.  If you make missles, you encourage people to believe they are in jeapordy and need those missles.  If you need to sell more missles, you need to convince someone to use those missles so that they will buy more from you.  Who makes nukes?  GE?  GD?  Northrup Gruman?  How much money do those 3 corps have to ‘market their wares’?  More than enough to sway the Federal Govt into using them.  I really have to say that America is a barbarous nation.  Being the only one in history to use nukes, perhaps the most barbarous in history.  The truly terrifying thing is, though, that the barbarism can get worse.

I believe President Cheney and his sock puppet George Bush intend to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran. That’s one of the main reasons I moved out of the United States. I don’t want it on my conscience that I stayed in a nation that would annihilate millions of people, just like I would have moved out of Germany in 1936 if I had been alive then and suspected what the regime was going to do.

I have no love for the Iranian regime. They are as mad with their vision of the return of the missing Mahdi as Rapture Right Christians are with their belief that they can make Jesus come back to Earth if they just start a big enough war in the Middle East. What’s scary is when two sets of religious delusions dovetail so perfectly with each other. Nut cases on either side want a lot of killing in God’s name, which will destroy the current pattern of civilisation.

If you’re curious about the ramifications of an American attack on Iran, paste this address into a browser: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net (I’m too farkin’ stoopid to know how to set it up as a hyperlink.) Read the article about “Pricing the Risk of War in Iran.” The guy who wrote it, William Engdahl, is a professor in Germany who specialises in oil and geopolitics, as you might guess from the name of his site. As good as Hedges’ article is, Engdahl comes up with angles that go far beyond it.

We’re in for some scary times, people. I’d say God help us, but I don’t believe that any god would let things go like I fear they’re gonna.

Iran has done nothing wrong: All accounts indicate that Iran is 5-10 years away from having a nuclear weapon. The war in Iran was planned months ago, in response to Iran setting up an oil exchange based on Euros instead of dollars. It’s a done deal: We have already been “prepared” by the Time magazine article. It’s not about nukes—it’s about another country having the audacity _not_ to trade in dollars. It’s about grabbing the oil while the US can. It’s about setting up permanent bases in the middle east in order to control the natural gas as well as oil.

Now all that is left is a national draft, which we in the US, as sheep, should assent to after “Iran” commits a terrorist act on US soil, due sometime in the next two weeks, conveniently before the elections. Yet another false-flag operation (like 9/11), should be enough to jump-start WWIII. Given what the US gov’t appears to have done to Americans on 9/11, what do you suppose they’ll do to provoke the next war? Detonate a dirty bomb on an “expendable” US city, with wide-ranging fallout?  Perhaps they’ll spare us on the mainland and merely blow up an ageing warship in the Persian Gulf?

Not just Iran but Russia, China, and a few other states will align against the US. Oh the irony—China, perhaps using weapons made from recycled steel prematurely whisked away from the 9/11 crime scene at ground zero, will turn against us.

One of the few jobs that hasn’t yet been outsourced to China is that of “soldier”...thanks to a coming economic collapse, people will sign up in droves with or without a draft. We’ll be plunged into a depression because the dollar will plummet. There is nothing but good will to back up the dollar. The dollar is printed by the Federal Reserve Bank, which is not Federal (it’s private), it has no reserve (and no gold to back the dollar), and it’s not a bank. Do you have a house and a retirement account? They will be worthless pretty soon. We have a giant trade deficit…we export nothing but dollars, and soon we won’t be able to import anything.

How did we get to this state? We used pre-emptive strikes on Irag...and the rest of the world paid attention. We refused to talk to Iran’s leaders, just like we refused to talk to N. Korea. We threatened instead. (If N. Korea had oil, we’d already be over there engaged in step #2, quagmire.)

To think that Clinton got impeached for consensual sex with a woman who worked in his office. This administration is already responsible for over a hundred thousand deaths (Iraqi & Afghanistani civilians, plus US military (in both wars), and US civilians (on 9/11). (Not convinced about US false-flag operations or that 9/11 required US gov’t cooperation? Go to this site: http://killtown.911review.org/.)

Thanks to our cooperative congress, we now conveniently have no rights, no way to protest except on the internet (which will probably be outlawed soon with corporate cooperation). We now cannot even remove recalcitrant congress-people: Our votes won’t count due to electronic voting machines! Arrrrgggggh!!!

“The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel.  And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies of the Jewish state.”

There is no irony, there. In the Apocalyptic reasoning of Fundamentalist Christians the destruction of a majority of Jewry is a necessary part of Christ’s battle with the Satan. After which it will be Paradise on Earth for the believers. Halleluja!

I don’t think this will happen. Although the administration is backed into a corner by scandal, an unpopular war, and incompetence, Daddy has come back into the picture to take control through his surrogate James Baker. Money will win out over theology and neo-conservatism. 43 will live out the rest of his presidency as a punching bag for the Democratic majority in the House.

Check out that sale at Macy’s! How ‘bout them Tigers!

It’s so hard to remain optimistic these days, to nestle into the sweet banalities of our cushy American lives. New, living nightmares keep intruding.

I hope this is article is pessimistic to the extreme. I really hope it is. But the fact that Chris’s thesis is credible - even if it isn’t likely to hold up, is disheartening enough. We have come so far from the positive, moral high ground we used to occupy, we may well be lost. I wish I had thought to drop bread crumbs along the way, so we could retrace our steps…

They won’t be happy until they’ve killed us all, no matter who we are.

This all seems a bit apocolyptic for my blood...though I suppose anything is possible...this photo, though, makes me wonder....when was the last time the US had a parade of arms like this...a parade of soldiers to be sure, but I don’t recall ever seeing a parade of missles and other weapons with the president looking on (maybe we have in the distant past I’m just not aware of them)....we have airshows which are certainly a parade of arms in some sense, but never of missiles...just the delivery vehicles....the US government, as much as it claims to dislike violence, seems to pursue its aggression behind closed doors...this tells me the American public isn’t as agreable as it appears..if we were that beligerant as a population, wouldn’t we see similar parades?...or maybe we all lead hypocrital lives...look at the top grossing hollywood movies...we appear to have a violent streak in us after all....maybe we should quit lieing to ourselves and embrace the violence that seems to be as American as apple pie....we are a Christian nation after all.....