Seymour Hersh has an interesting article in the New Yorker about the planning and internal government arguments going on about a potential air campaign against Iran to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. Hersh is provocative, and he is no friend of the current administration, but he has good sources and I find the article to be a credible explanation of what is probably happening inside the government as officials debate what should be done about Iran.

Victor Davis Hanson also speculates about the potential for confrontation with Iran.

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

So far the Iranian president has posed as someone 90-percent crazy and 10-percent sane, hoping we would fear his overt madness and delicately appeal to his small reservoirs of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90-percent children of the Enlightenment, they are still effused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.

So, please, Mr. Ahmadinejad, cool the rhetoric fast — before you needlessly push once reasonable people against the wall, and thus talk your way into a sky full of very angry and righteous jets.

Hanson, a historian, still believes the peoples of the West have the ability to regress into the butchers who killed by the millions in the 20th Century (and millions more in the 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, and so on), they just need to be pushed into a corner before those old instincts re-assert themselves. I'm not so sure about the Europeans but, remembering the attitudes I heard after 9/11, I think the American people are still ready, willing and able to visit great destruction on anyone perceived as a threat to our lives, property and liberty. After all, our grandparents had no problem with Curtis LeMay's firebombing of Japanese cities as a just payback for Pearl Harbor.

That, of course, is the main point Hanson is getting at. We need to feel our backs against the wall before we strike out with all our power. That isn't the case with Iraq, and it is not yet the case with Iran. The problem for Bush is that the political will to make war against Iran won't exist until the Iranians get the bomb and they (or their surrogates) use it against us. Bush doesn't want to wait until an American city lies in radioactive ruins (or, for that matter, an Israeli or European city). He wants to use our power to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb. Politically, this may not be possible. If he does it anyway, he may consign the GOP to minority status for a generation.