YIKES !

This is what we've come to expect of reporters for the NYT.

I concur with Noah Pollack. Yikes.

Let's take a look at what this Hedges guy has to say in the article Pollack refers to. It's actually quite stunning:

Let us hope sanity prevails. But sanity is a rare commodity in a White House that has twisted Trotsky's concept of permanent revolution into a policy of permanent war with nefarious aims--to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.

A war with Iran is doomed. It will be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group.

I think he's particularly clever by using the allusion to Trotsky, of all people in his exaggeratedly emotional rant. I also think its clever to try to portray Iran as an opponent, instead of an enemy; and attribute to the U.S. the fact that this region of the world in unstable. Not to mention the thousands of US citizens who have apparently been "stripped" of their constituional rights.

After all that, we come to the money quote: A war with Iran is doomed.

Geez. I guess the sane thing to do is to surrender to the mullahs before we engage them at all; which sounds like something Jimmy Carter would say.

This is what Hedges, a New York Times reporter for 15 years, and its Middle East bureau chief in the 1990's thinks.

So, it is fortunate for the US that Iran isn't really planning to make a nuclear bomb, isn't it? Of course, that optimism assumes they don't already have one, courtesy of regimes like the communist paradise of North Korea.... It could just another great intelligence scam, as suggested by Michael Ledeen; or, Norman Podhoretz entertains a darker suspicion:

...that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

Accusations of paranoia, warmongering and waging a "war on knowledge" (somebody needs to explain to the nincompoops on that side of the political spectrum that "intelligence" of the sort we are talking about has less to do with actual knowledge than it has to do with "connecting the dots" in the dark, and blindfolded...which is exactly what they claimed we didn't do prior to 9/11--but, hey, consistency isn't one of their strong points). This isn't college, dudes.

Why, one wonders, does the NIE only have credibility when it supports the ostrich-like agenda of the political left, where psychological denial is so very comforting?

I expect I will still be alive--though perhaps not for long-- when the west finally gets objective, incontrovertable data on Iran's nuclear intentions. Even now, I suspect the left is preparing the necessary talking points and apologetic rhetoric for that fateful day--in the same way they continue to defend Saddam Hussein who developed and used WMD's against his own people without much thought or conscience and most certainly had ongoing plans for their use against other enemies of his regime.