“Chris Hedges: Bush’s Nuclear Apocalypse”

Read this sobering article Truthdig - Reports - Chris Hedges: Bush‘s Nuclear Apocalypse:

The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran.  The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month.  It may be a bluff.  It may be a feint.  It may be a simple show of American power.  But I doubt it. 

War with Iran - a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East - is probable by the end of the Bush administration.  It could begin in as little as three weeks.  This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as “the Axis of Evil.“ They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran.  Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council.  He knew nothing about Central America.  He knows nothing about the Middle East.  He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light.  And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.

These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States, slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.