Via John, William River Pitts has some bad news:
I told my boss that I couldn't believe it was possible the Bush administration would do this. I ran through all the reasons why an attack on Iran, especially with any kind of nuclear weaponry, would be the height of folly.
Iran, unlike Iraq, has a formidable military. They own the high ground over the Persian Gulf and have deployed missile batteries all throughout the mountains along the shore. Those missile batteries, I told him, include the Sunburn missile, which can travel in excess of Mach 2 and can spoof Aegis radar systems. Every American warship in the Gulf, including the carrier group currently deployed there, would be ducks on the pond.
Sigh. I think what scares me about Bush is that the guy has lost all sense of temporal accountability. In a very real sense, I wish his poll numbers were 20 points higher, because then he'd have something to lose. As it is, he's pegged his unpopularity to the Truman metaphor: that the real judgment will come 20 years hence, when we all gather round the campfires to tell stories of how George Bush and his mighty blue ox Babe rid the Middle East of villains and maniacs, and did it all above the churlish protests of short-sighted pissants like ourselves. So long as he's decided absolution will come decades into the future, there's nothing holding him accountable now, and no reason not to go for broke. And that, quite honestly, scares the hell out of me.
