Clear and Present Danger

UPDATE: Suggestions in the blogosphere that Cheney is orchestrating an early September sales campaign for war on Iran.

The noise is killing us in more ways than one. We keep missing the important stories. Sometimes because they're deliberately hidden and those whose job it is to discover and tell these stories just aren't doing it. When the Bushites sneaked a provision into the huge Defense Authorization Act last October that allows the President to declare martial law--to override state and local officials and use the military as domestic police in response to unspecified "emergencies"-- virtually no one reported it. It remains what it was supposed to be, a secret.

In this case, one which potentially makes dictatorship legal. For the entire history of the Republic, every President could declare martial law only if threatened with an armed insurrection. That's how seriously this nation's founders considered it, and not in the most perilous times in our history has this law changed, until last October.

But right now we're missing a crucial story that's totally public, that in fact President Bush announced in a media-covered speech. Even most of the lefty blogs, currently feasting on the Idahomosexual story, ignored it.

Fortunately one of the more respected bloggers, Glenn Greenwald, didn't. Perhaps Bush's threat against Iran sounded like the same old. Greenwald calls it "the most disturbing speech of his presidency." It sounded to me when I heard just the soundbite that it was tantamount to an announcement that this administration is going to militarily attack Iran, very soon.

Nobody wants to believe Bush will do it. It's too much of an utter nightmare. The military is overstretched to the breaking point in Iraq. There's some question as to whether orders would be followed, although Bush--or should we say Cheney--is likely to depend on the Air Force and Navy who have paid less of a price and may want more of the action. And nobody wants to contemplate what a disaster it could very well begin.

It seems in fact like madness. Apart from the rising guilt over needless death in Iraq, the Washington and media establishments are apparently willing to tolerate a crazy President and an insane Vice-President for a year and a half more, assuming they will confine their looniness to surreal speeches and delusional press conferences. We wish. But it seems increasingly like we're not going to get off that easy.

So far the human price of Iraq has been paid (at least directly) by a relative few, and the bulk of the cost has been pushed into the future. Bush's design in Iraq seems to be to push obvious failure past the expiration of his term, so Republicans can blame Democrats should they win the White House and retain Congress. But a sustained bombing of Iran would likely begin a sequence of events that would make Iraq pale by comparison. The calculation might be that an even greater war, a regional war with global reach, would force voters to support the war party and its candidate, Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson.

Such an attack and such a war have endless possibilities for catastrophe that might transform the country, and could very well destroy it. A wrecked domestic economy, energy rationing, a military draft--it could well end up with the realization of that first untold story: martial law in America, brought to you by Halliburton and Blackwater.

And don't forget, the plans for attacking Iran as initially revealed involved the U.S. using tactical nuclear weapons. It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheney government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power in the world under Bush is that this government is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.

But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran could turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long-lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.