Read Billmon over at The Whiskey Bar

I was hoping this sick bad feeling I caught during the Dubai Ports story, that we have been set on a course to destroy Iran, was off target. I've been feeling little glimmers of hope, when the Sy Hersh prediction of late August passed, with the more open debate this time in contrast to the run up to the Iraq invasion, with the rumors that Washington insiders were realizing this plan would be a costly disaster.
Or the hopeful glimmer in this piece by James Wolcott.
But Billmon's Sept. 21 offering, http://billmon.org/archives/002753.html
has me depressed all over again.
It's a good long article, Please Go Read It All. He ends his analysis with the following passage:

There is only one U.S. move I can think of that could possibly offset Iran's natural advantages in this game of geopolitical chess -- the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The objective of such a strike would not only be to destroy Iran's nuclear plants more completely, but to demonstrate to Tehran that the old rules don't apply, that America is prepared to commit even barbarous war crimes if that's what it takes to deter hostile powers from acquiring, or even trying to acquire, nuclear weapons.

It would, in other words, take the logic of preventative war -- and Cheney's one percent doctrine -- to their ultimate conclusion.

Perhaps saturation bombing -- the indiscriminate destruction of Iran's civilian infrastructure and economic resources -- could accomplish the same goal. It would, however, take longer, be messier (from the Pentagon's point of view) and wouldn't have the same psychological shock value as the deliberate first use of tactical nuclear weapons. A certain kind of mind (that is, one resembling a vacant lot) might even convince itself that a nuclear strike is actually the more humane option, or that it's what Harry Truman would have done, or some other piece of sophism.

The consequences, of course, would be appalling -- for the Iranian people, for the world, for Americans who prefer not to be regarded as the direct, linear heirs of the Nazi Party. But if the overriding objective is to stop Iran from building a bomb -- or rather, to make absolutely sure they can't or won't build one -- and military force is held to be the only option left on the table, then a tactical nuclear strike, or even multiple strikes, may be the only way to do it.

Matt Yglesias has reported chatter in Washington that the Cheneyites might order such a strike and then deny it, relying on the chaotic aftermath and the residual traces of Iran's own nuclear materials to cover their traces. This sounds absurd to me -- I'm reasonably sure it would be technically impossible to hide the tell tale signs of a nuclear detonation. But the fact that it's being talked about -- even if just as a cocktail party rumor -- is a bad sign. It means the idea is being normalized, injected into the debate, made thinkable. I can already imagine the boys at Fox News awarding Shrub brownie points because he doesn't deny ordering the first use of nuclear weapons.

And now, poetry...
Deadline
-- Barbara Kingsolver

The night before war begins, and you are still here.
You can stand in a breathless cold
ocean of candles, a thousand issues of your same face
rubbed white from below by clear waxed light.
A vigil. You are wondering what it is
you can hold a candle to.

You have a daughter. Her cheeks curve
like aspects of the Mohammed's perfect pear.
She is three. Too young for candles but
you are here, this is war.
Flames covet the gold-sparked ends of her hair,
her nylon parka laughing in color,
inflammable. It has taken your whole self
to bring her undamaged to this moment,
and waiting in the desert at this moment
is a bomb that flings gasoline in a liquid sheet,
a laundress's snap overhead, wide as the ancient Tigris,
and ignites as it descends.

The polls have sung their opera of assent: the land
wants war. But here is another America,
candle-throated, sure as tide.
Whoever you are, you are also this granite anger.
In history you will be the vigilant dead
who stood in front of every war with old hearts
in your pockets, stood on the carcass of hope
listening for the thunder of its feathers.

The desert is diamond ice and only stars above us here
and elsewhere, a thousand issues of a clear waxed star,
a holocaust of heaven
and somewhere, a way out.