Nuclear option off the table...

Thank goodness! Never thought I'd see the day that I'd be thankful to military men who put the brakes on a civilian president.

...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....

Of course, Bush/Cheney and their dogs of war are so unscrupulous, I'm not entirely breathing easy. They may do an end run around Pace and the generals.

According to Seymour Hersh, one of the most principled journalists left in America, Pace resorted to political, economic and strategic arguments to dissuade Bush from nuclear weapons. U.S. military intelligence has come up empty on nuclear weapons sites in Iran. (In other words, Iran may be telling the truth about wanting to develop nuclear power for civilian use only.) If America starts bombing indiscriminately, so the argument goes, Iran could effectively shut down the world's oil supply, resulting in serious economic consequences for America and political costs for Bush.

Sad, isn't it, that economic and political arguments work where the prospect of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians deaths doesn't?

That Bush openly considered using nuclear weapons in what would be the first nuclear strike since Nagasaki, and this against a country with which the U.S. is not at war, and American citizens did not fill the streets in non-violent protest has got to be one of the lowest moments in American history. How utterly shameful that it's the military who stood up to the president on this and not the American people.

Iran and the world are not home free. Bush/Cheney are still going forward with military contingency plans. The same Bush who, Hersh writes, remains "confident in his military decisions." In blind defiance of every shred of evidence.

Even the prospect of Iranian volunteers flooding Iraq in the thousands to attack American soldiers in revenge for an American air war against Iran doesn't dissuade the blood-thirsty Republican hawks, who insanely claim such a development would divide Iraqi Shiites into pro- and anti-Iranian camps and unify Iraqi Kurds and the Sunnis.

Complete story here.