Some Opinion from New Jersey

Via atrios, I found this this morning. Here's the first three paragraphs:

Reports that the Bush administration is considering a nuclear strike on Iran may not frighten the mad mullahs in Tehran, but it will scare the hell out of many Americans here at home.

It's hard to believe that with one military venture gone bad in Iraq and a world that now sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace, the Bushies would contemplate attacking a second nation, this time with tactical nukes. Which prompts two questions: Are these guys obsessed with a messianic sense of world mission that has robbed them of common sense? Or are they just plain nuts?

And the answers are yes and possibly so.

I would have answered a resounding yes on the second question as well, but that's just me. There's more:

What's fascinating about these neocons is their obsession with the use of force as old men when, as young men, many of them --notably Cheney -- managed to avoid service in Vietnam. In their youth, when it might have mattered for their country, they never fired a shot in anger. (In Cheney's case, considering his marksmanship, that was not all bad.)

The whole Iranian matter is fraught with awful irony and echoes of mistakes made in Iraq. Consider, for example, the irony of America inflicting a nuclear strike on the people of Iran in the name of stopping nuclear proliferation. Are the Bushies totally insensate? Or are they simply stupid?

Again, I'd answer yes and yes. But the finale is the best part:

It may be seen as surprising that the voices of reason and restraint in this Iran question, as Hersh reports it, are the generals. But it shouldn't be. After all, it was George Washington who warned against the dangers of a standing peacetime army, and Dwight Eisenhower who alerted us to the danger of the military-industrial complex. Having seen it, they know the horror of war.

And what about the neocons, our home-front heroes -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, the civilians they've recruited like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley -- who orchestrated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war and foreign regime change?

They should never again be allowed anywhere near the instruments and agencies of the American government.

Never again.