Nuts

Uh oh. Don't tell Rudy and William the Bloody Kristol, but the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks that they are raging lunatics.

He rejected the counsel of those who might urge immediate attacks inside Iran to destroy nuclear installations or to stop the flow of explosives that end up as powerful roadside bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan, killing American troops.

With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region “has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.” The military option, he said, should be a last resort.

And just in case all of the saber rattling from Michael Leeden and Bill Kristol wasn't clear, Cheney laid out his philosophy quite baldly this weekend. From his speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

They've chosen this method because they believe it works, and they believe the history of the late 20th century proves the point. During the 1980s and '90s, as terror networks began to wage attacks against Americans, we usually responded, if at all, with subpoenas, indictments, and the occasional cruise missile. As time passed, the terrorists believed they'd exposed a certain weakness and lack of confidence in the West, particularly in America.

Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists' reasoning this way: "During the Cold War," Dr. Lewis wrote, "two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: 'What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'" End quote.

Get it? The Commie haters, the guys that we're so obsessed with Communism as a threat to our shores for three decades actually were envious of the Reds. Cheney and these authoritarian wannabes gazed longingly at the totalitarian regime that used unchecked brutality to vanquish opposition domestically and internationally. This is where warrantless wiretapping and rendition and Abu Ghraib all begin, with a man crush on authoritarianism and the lattitude of an unchecked executive power. And just like the Communists, the background has to be fear. In order for these guys to succeed, it is imperative that we all be kept in a state of high anxiety. World War III, duct tape, orange alerts, the like. Again, we see that Reagan and GHWBush, for their flaws, were pikers compared to these nuts.

UPDATE: That would be this Bernard Lewis, mentioned by Cheney above

Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

What do these guys have for 90 year old ghouls like Podhoretz and Lewis?