Pull it! Military Officers Resigning over Bush Plans to Nuke Iran

Well this is as good a place to start as any and many thanks to my buddy Vince for allowing me to guest blog tonight.

We are to be forgiven for surpressing our Stranglovian nightmares all these years. We simply couldn't believe that anyone would be both crazy enough to do it and get elected to the presidency. Even after both of those things happened we always had the feeling that some kind of sanity would prevail. Hello rube.

Beginning with Juan Cole's new year's predictions I've had the unsettling feeling about a 2006 meltdown. As I went through the list with friends I found myself signing-off with my fear of a Bush Admin nuclear strike in the Middle East.

To tell the truth, I kinda thought they'd get the Israelis to do it but after their smackdown of the Iraqi reactor in '81, I guess it's our turn. Probably because of that I never stopped to consider what the reaction of the US military would be (even though I'm former USAF.)

If I had given it some thought I'm sure that I'd have pondered the reaction of the officer corps:

1. they hate Rumsfeld and always have. I remember the front page of the NYT on the morning of 9-11-01 saying that the Bush Administration wanted to fire Rummy but was waiting because they didn't want him to break Les Aspin's record as the shortest lived Sec'y of Defense. The purges of the biggest Rumsfeld-haters began almost immediately.

2. in spite of Geo. C. Scott's portrayal of dear ol' Gen. LeMay, the military doesn't like nuclear weapons. It goes contrary to their education. War is personal for the officer corps and they like it that way. Nukes are to be used against nukes, otherwise, war is their opportunity to excersise that for which they have trained a lifetime.

3. the order has to come from somewhere. There had better be legitimacy behind it. I remember the days when Henry the K made the phonecall that told the Pentagon to ignore any late-night orders for nukes from Dick Nixon. I imagine there are a few others that remember that, too.

Of course, we're talking about "tactical" nuclear weapons and not the nightmarish, dual-key, underground North Dakota, ICBM scenario that my generation spent a lot of time ducking and covering from. But we've never launched any of those. These will be bombs. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombs, too.

Ike was of the opinion that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan was a bad idea and was so angry with Truman that he barely spoke to him again (it made for a strange inauguration.) I suspect there is still a strain of that thought within the military today. Not to mention that these bunker busters are actually more powerful than the two we dropped in 1945, just shaped and timed to go off underground instead of overhead...if all goes well.

The men and women that will follow and give the orders to use these weapons are more than just a little aware of how this war has been sold to the American public. And if the parallels between glorious WWII and Bush's Iraqi cakewalk have sounded strained to you and I, military personnel that have been to Iraq really don't see the connection between the two wars. (Practically 100% have rotated through by now.)

That we're hearing of resignations over this shouldn't have surprised me but it did. http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/04/time-to-quit.html