It's come to this. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who's the designated apostle of globalisation under the military and political dominance of the United States, posed a question a couple weeks back. Which is preferable, he mused: getting used to living with a nuclear-armed Iran, or a war against Iran under the leadership of the Bush administration?
Friedman, who vocally backed the conquest of raq and even now supports the continuing occupation in the "hope of a decent outcome" there, had a clear answer. Iran with nuclear weapons, he opined, is less dangerous than a war led by the fools running the White House and the Pentagon.
What's significant here isn't the question of whether Iran is close to nuclear weapons in the first place. It's that more and more of the U.S. establishment lacks any confidence in the Bush regime's ability to handle a crisis, imagined or real.
This is particularly remarkable at a time when the U.S. economy is not yet in immediate major trouble - the fear is that political mismanagement may in fact produce such a crisis.
Friedman's column coincided roughly with a battery of "retired" U.S. generals coming forth with demands for the resignation or firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In so doing, they undoubtedly reflect powerful sentiment among active-duty officers who don't have the liberty to speak what they know to be the truth.
The truth is that the Bush administration has lost the war in Iraq, and "staying the course till victory" as it promises will produce a meltdown of the military reserves and National Guard.
The military brass, who know insanity when they see it, also fear that the current White House might just possibly be crazy enough to hit Iranian uranium-enrichment facilities with "tactical" nuclear weapons - a prospect which would make the United States the pariah state of the world, and end any hope of preventing global nuclear proliferation.
Even short of this lunacy, "conventional" bombing of Iran - which would hit hundreds of targets and would clearly aim at toppling the Iranian regime -would almost surely lead to total chaos in Iraq, with U.S. forces under assault from the majority Shia population and with appalling regional conseIt is quite possible, it seems to me, that if this administration does collapse, it could go down quickly. quences. There is no one - and I mean no one - outside the shrinking neoconservative bunker who believes the Bush gang is competent to handle a crisis on that global scale.
The attack on Rumsfeld is clearly understood as an attack on tie daministratiul as a whole. The White House assembled a rapid-reaction team of other retired generals to leap to Rumsfeld's defense in the rightwing media.
One analyst, Douglas McGregor, probably had it about right when he argued that the anti-Rumsfeld generals who served in Iraq are trying to cover up for their own miserable failures to secure weapons facilities and other strategic sites, by pointing to the very real screwups of the civilian leadership.
In a separate development, White House "advisor" (master of spin and dirty politics) Karl Rove was pushed out while under ongoing criminal investigation for the leak of the identity of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame.
White House chief of staff Andrew Card has also departed; and press secretary Scott McLellan has also resigned to be replaced by the hard-right commentator Tony Snow, a kind of intellectual equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and a sometimes stand-in on Limbaugh's radio program when Rush is away in search of illicit painkillers...but I digress.
In any case, these changes represent a reshuffling of the administration's deck chairs. The fall of Rumsfeld, on the other hand, would represent the beginning of the end of this regime.
In this writer's speculation, neither a Rumsfeld resignation nor an overt attack on Iran are likely before the November midterm Congressional elections.
Getting rid of the Secretary of Defense now would constitute an admission of defeat in Iraq, while attacking Iran will produce $100 a barrel oil and $5.00 a gallon gas in the United States, either of which means political death.
Most likely, the November elections will determine whether the Bush administration becomes a two-year "lame duck," and (b) it can be restrained from going out with a military bang that threatens to take the Middle East and the world economy down with it.
It is quite possible, it seems to me, that if this administration does collapse, it could go down quickly. Conceivably, for example, the impending court martial of the chief of interrogations at Abu Ghraib might implicate Rumsfeld in directly ordering torture - unless a high-level decision has been taken to protect him.
As to the possible attack on Iran and the appalling potential consequences, there would be more grounds for optimism if the ostensible "opposition" party, the Democrats, actually opposed it. • David Finkel is an editor of AGAINST THE CURRENT (www.solidarity-us.org