Nuke Iran?

While it isn't universally the case, the majority of narrative fiction is predicated on a straightforward concept: characters make the wrong decisions. That's what impels them into conflict and into the strands of plot. Never mind the techniques writers use to bring about resolution; the setup of most stories involves people choosing poorly, and bringing about whatever 300 pages of consequences, actions, and counteractions remain.

Some of my favorite writers have mastered the difficult task of writing tragic comedies in which their characters decide wrongly again and again. Graham Greene did it. Michael Chabon does it. In movies, the Cohen brothers do it. It's a difficult task because it requires the writer to compel his readers to believe in a sort of supreme irrationality in the citizens of their fictions. The tragedy is in the inescapability of picking the wrong door; the comedy, likewise.

I find this a helpful lens in regarding the Bush Administration, which functions on a similar system: if there's a decision to be made, by god, they'll make the wrong one, often spectacularly so.

That's why, although I'd like to dismiss it, I have to take it seriously when Sy Hersh writes that the civilians in the Pentagon and the boys in the West Wing want to nuke Iran. Rationally, it seems impossible. We haven't the power to do it; we're bogged down elsewhere; the consequences would be so monstrously, self-evidently catastrophic that no sane person could consider it. But the impediments that fact and consequence set on the behavior of the rest of us clearly don't apply to these people, whose capacity for consideration was long ago smothered beneath a towering accretion of slogans.
Put otherwise, these jokers may well do it because it’s precisely the wrong thing to do, the least possible, the most likely to do great harm.

As is and was the case with Iraq, there’s frightfully little indication that anyone has actually thought about what the hell we’d do with the place after the first bombs start falling. The most fanciful thinkers seem to believe that some sort of spontaneous revolution would break out, in that inimitably passive Americo-journalistic construction. That anyone believes aerial bombardment would spark domestic revolt is a testament to the level of political sophistication in the higher circles of our military in government. “Every animal is driven to pasture with a blow,” said Heraclitus, which may be true, but which is hardly a principle for modern international affairs. Iranians—some, many, most—may dislike the rule of the mullahs, but we’ve provided a far-too-adequate external foil for the ruling regime with our deadly, swashbuckling vandalism of an entire neighboring nation. Give me Liberty or Give me Death—that’s a notion I and a few others hold dear, but in truth, the vast majority of human race would rather be repressed than dead.

Will the US bomb Iran? It’s as yet impossible to say, though I place my bets in the Yes column. Either way, it’s folly to discount it as impossible simple because it’s impossible. If nothing else, the dauphin and his ministers have proven that sort of thinking pretty much past the expiration date.