Last Stand
Two harrowing snippets from Seymour Hersch's "Last Stand: The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy" (New Yorker, 10 July 2006):
A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, “The [military-planning] system [that's looking for excuses to bomb Iran] is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, ‘We stood up.’ ”
[…]
In late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. The huge complex includes large underground facilities built into seventy-five-foot-deep holes in the ground and designed to hold as many as fifty thousand centrifuges. “Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ ”
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on Wednesday, 5 July 2006 at 21.10
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If this is true, God bless Gen. Pace. It's high time someone exhibited the cojones to tell Bush and Cheney what they need to hear, even if doing so could cost the person his or her job.
Then again, given Bush's poll numbers, all the publicity about what Bush & Co. did to Joe Wilson and his wife, and how well known the tactic of trashing anyone deemed disagreeable has become, it may be Pace sensed they wouldn't do him in.