Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece on US planning for unprovoked military attacks on Iran hasn't showed up in our mailbox yet, but it's already eliciting commentary. I read a transcript of an Amy Goodman interview with Hersh earlier today, but Billmon's post is worth even more. Billmon calls his post "Mutually Assured Dementia," and goes on to speculate about possible reaction, both domestic and worldwide, to an unprovoked nuclear first strike on Iran. To call such a strike "preemptive" concedes way too much ground. Thus far, no nation that has actually developed nuclear weapons has come close to using them against the US. Iran is not necessarily even working on nuclear weapons. And thus far the most aggressive act Iran has taken against the US was to send a mob of students into the same US embassy in Tehran that orchestrated the 1953 coup that ended Iran's democracy and installed Shah Mohammed Reza, whose dictatorial regime had just been overthrown.

Hersh's reporting to date has been dead on. He evidently has extraordinarily reliable sources deep within the security aparatus, and he manages to depict them as principled enough that one has to conclude that there are still isolated pockets of sanity in the DOD and CIA, even while the civilian political rulers are out to lunch. So there can be little doubt but that such plans are actively being worked on. Which raises two questions: 1) how can they be so demented? and 2) why is there no significant political opposition to such plans? As Billmon puts it:

But to the extent there is a rational excuse for treating a nuclear strike on Iran as the journalistic equivalent of a seasonal story about people washing their cars, it must be the cynical conviction that the Cheneyites aren't serious -- they're just doing their little Gen. Jack Ripper impression to let the Iranians know they really mean business.

This may seem plausible -- that is, if you were in a catatonic stupor throughout 2002 and the early months of 2003 (which is just another way of saying: if you were a member in good standing of the corporate media elite). But the rest of us have learned that when Dick Cheney starts muttering about precious bodily fluids, you'd better pay attention. He really does mean business, and when Dick Cheney means business, bombs are likely to start falling sooner rather than later.

Maybe the idea of the United States would launch a nuclear first strike -- albeit a "surgical" one -- is too hard for most Americans, including most American journalists, to process.

This raises an old question -- one that's entered my mind many times, but for fear of transgressing Godwin's Law I've refrained from publishing. Yep, this has to do with Nazi Germany, but please bear with me. My question is: At what point did a significant number of Germans realize that Hitler and the Nazis were leading Germany to doom and becoming a collective national embarrassment? Or, to put the point more starkly, at what point did most Germans realize that Germany would be better off to be unconditionally defeated in war? This latter state certainly set in after WWII ended -- unlike the aftermath of WWI, there were no significant number of sore losers in post-WWII Germany. But did any significant number of Germans, beyond such obvious Nazi targets as Jews and Communists, harbor such reservations before the war started in 1939? Or before the war started to turn in Stalingrad?

I don't know the answer to that, but I suspect not. I suspect that it's really difficult for people in a well aligned modern nation to recognize when their leaders cross the line from being eccentric to self-destructively insane. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are two very good examples of this. The Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao may be two more, and tellingly so because they only fell out of favor after they had died and their successors had started to admit and tried to repair the damage. There just seems to be a major cognitive problem with a nation accepting the fact that its leaders -- even manifestly undemocratic ones -- are totally crackers, at least while they're in power.

Now, I'm not saying that Bush is like Hitler or Stalin or Hirohito or anything like that, nor that the Republicans are Nazis or Fascists or the like. But their actual war in Iraq and their hypothetical -- gamed, or fantasized -- war against Iran are seriously demented. In principle, a representative democracy should make it impossible for such nutcases to achieve any significant level of power. Sometimes that's even worked in the US, as when David Duke and Oliver North lost elections in normally far-right states. But something is way out of whack here: for starters, a mainstream media and a political class that dares not challenge the President and his Administration on matters as fundamental as war and peace, but also a populace that can't begin to recognize a disaster until after it's already happened. We may not be led by Nazis, but that doesn't mean we won't follow our leaders until it is much too late.