Dartblog

Saith Handey in a bygone era of the “Saturday Night Live” program, “If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at some guys, throw one of those little baby-type pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think of how crazy war is, and while they’re thinking, you can throw a real grenade.”

Now, Jack Handey doesn’t actually create American foreign policy, and he is not actually a contributory commentator, but he does write whimsical little stories like “What I’d Say to the Martians” in the magazine the New Yorker. And being one of the New Yorker’s culture apostles does seem to qualify one to make sweeping political generalities, to interview un-named “high-ranking” folk, and then issue whatever charges one would against the current White House.

Take Seymour Hersh, for example. He has been proved either wrong or a hyperbolist (Or a libeling bomb-thrower.) on every sordid piece he’s dispatched on the Iraq War. And now he preaches that—heaven forfend the drawing of plans!—the Bush White House has plans to use nuclear weaponry against Iran should Iran fail to abandon its illegal program in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

There are many things wrong with Hersh’s long piece, which is mostly a colorful recounting of a not-for-attribution coffee coversation he had in Vienna with a former diplomat. Indeed, the article contains almost no names at all, besides George W. Bush’s of course. No single critical source, including the retiree, has named himself, and no note is made of second-source confirmation on any of the claims. Some of Hersh’s most precious unsourced one-liners—“The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision,” for example—come from Democratic politicians about to run against Republicans.

But forget Hersh’s patented shoddiness. There are serious questions to be made about the entire message of his piece. He treats the notion that the Bush administration is preparing nuclear strikes on Iran as some kind of revelation.

Every capable nation on this Earth has plans to invade or destroy each of its threats. The United States had such files for Iraq. They were among the most up-to-date in 2003 and that is part of the reason why Iraq was invaded. We’ve got them for Western Europe and Canada—although one imagines those ancient files are mostly for lunchtime guffaws at the Pentagon cafeteria—and we certainly have half-century-old ones for Russia, Germany, Japan, and rather recent ones for the most dangerous middle eastern states. It is only natural that America have a precise battle plan for nuclear strikes on Iran, where, yes, crazed anti-American religious extremists are, yes, in possesion of nuclear materiel and, yes, have done the political calculus necessary to prevent international intervention. The natural response to such a situation is to be prepared to wage either a reprisal or US-initiated asymmetrical warfare aimed at reducing nuclear progress.

The short word: Of course the Bush administration has painstakingly detailed plans for a full nuclear strike on the nation of Iran. Any president who had not by now commissioned such documents should, and would, be impeached forthwith and removed from office, for gross negligence.

But Seymour’s outrage is twofold. He doesn’t like that the plans exist, and he doesn’t like that they are nuclear in nature. The second is also essentially without merit. Journos steeped in the cinema and generally out of touch with military developments still envision Hiroshema and Nagasaki when the words “nuclear strike” are uttered. Or they imagine the Soviets’ Tsar Bomba nuclear device, which was the largest one mankind has ever had the displeasure of seeing detonated and whose fifty-seven megatons must surely be dwarfed by what is available today. And while that’s true, it doesn’t mean that the United States makes much investment in massive nuclear bombs.

We don’t. For one thing, they are expensive, which makes duds expensive and mistakes more costly. It limits the number of delivery vehicles from whose bays the bomb can be deployed. They are more complicated and less flexible in use. They are more difficult to store. And they present a general practical derogation from the modern method of waging war, which is to spare civilians at even a great cost to our own destructive efficacy. (Unfortunately our current enemies do not subscribe to this humanitarian tenet.) The requirement now is to destroy as much of the enemy’s hard gray steel and uniformed men as possible, and then shape his nation right and leave. Massive hydrogen bombs go nowhere towards this purpose. However, small “tactical nuclear weapons” do, and the United States has a lot of them. (Like, a lot a lot.)

And tactical nuclear weapons, which are useful only isasmuch as they pack the explosive power of a handful of regular bombs into a single package, are what Seymour Hersh finds penciled into America’s plans for a possible strike on the rogue nation of Iran. It is important to note that these are not—not by any definition—weapons of mass destruction. “Nuclear” does not a WMD make. Scale bestows that most feared acronym.

And the bombs we’d be using are expressly for the purpose of scratching the barren mounts of Iran just enough that regular old incendiaries can destroy the illegal war-making, Sharia-enforcing materiel inside.

I’d like to have more on this to come, especially Hersh’s outrageous claim that the Bush administration in drawing up these plans is eschewing comprise and neglecting diplomacy. The glacial United Nations and the Collective Security Babel Brigade have been churning on this question for what science has generally come to believe is seven eons. Every moment, right now, every second as your eyes pore over these words, George W. Bush is being patient. Every moment. And then, some time in the future, if the mad Iranian idealogues do not abandon their reckless weapon program and their credible threats to America, Israel, and other peace-loving nations, there will be no more patience, and starker words will be had; words like “forty-eight hours.”

Because the United Nations is unquestionably not, America must remain credible when it says that unstable, aggressive, religiously imperialist nations like Iran cannot possess the ultimate weapon. Largely because of people like Seymour Hersh, that claim is not currently credible, because the true and able enemies of America, whose designs and investments are on destroying innocent life here, believe that America cannot be unified in a fight. Seymour Hersh should ask himself if he helps that perception or hinders it.