"Recipe for Holy War: Add two nut jobs and stir" by Beth Quinn, Times Harald-Record
All right. I'm now officially scared.
What we have here is the bad guy versus the bad guy - two madmen playing an international game of chicken, ratcheting up the rhetoric to appeal to their fundamentalist followers.
There's no doubt that Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is mad in the head. In fact, it might help you remember his name if you pronounce it "Ah'm mad in ee head."
He's got a uranium enrichment program going on so he can build nuclear power plants. But since he's crazy, there's a lot of worldwide concern that he's going to build a nuclear bomb while he's at it.
The U.N. atomic watchdog agency, which paid him a little visit last week, says there's no evidence that he's working on weapons. Even so, the world is feeling a little squirmy about letting Ah'm Mad In Ee Head carry on with his nuclear program. Everyone keeps asking him to quit it, but he's dug in his heels.
So that's one madman on the loose.
The other one - our very own nut job in the White House - is licking his chops over what he perceives as a stubborn challenge from Iran's president.
In last week's New Yorker magazine, Hersh provided a detailed look at Bush's response to Ah'm Mad In Ee Head. According to Hersh's sources, Bush wants Ah'm Mad In Ee Head to defy U.N. demands to quit playing with uranium.
You know why? Because our own madman wants to trot out one of our own nukes and bomb Iran's madman out of business - along with a few hundred thousand other Iranians, of course.
As one congressman told Hersh, "The most worrisome thing is that Bush has a messianic vision." Bush is waging a holy war. He's on a crusade. And so is Ah'm Mad In Ee Head.
One nut-job fundamentalist Christian plus one nut-job fundamentalist Muslim equals one nut-job Holy War.
"Descent into anger and despair" by James Carroll, The Boston Globe
An Iranian official dismissed the talk of imminent US military action as mere psychological warfare, but then he made a telling observation. Instead of attributing the escalations of threat to strategic impulses, the official labeled them a manifestation of ''Americans' anger and despair."
The phrase leapt out of the news report, demanding to be taken seriously. I hadn't considered it before, but anger and despair so precisely define the broad American mood that those emotions may be the only things that President Bush and his circle have in common with the surrounding legions of his antagonists. We are in anger and despair because every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass. Bush's team is in anger and despair because their grand and -- to them -- selfless ambitions have been thwarted at every turn. Indeed, anger and despair can seem universally inevitable responses to what America has done and what it faces now.
While the anger and despair of those on the margins of power only increase the experience of marginal powerlessness, the anger and despair of those who continue to shape national policy can be truly dangerous if such policy owes more to these emotions than to reasoned realism. Is such affective disarray subliminally shaping the direction of US policy?
So what do we have as a national government policy? Nut-Job Policy? Slowly spinning toward a nuclear Holy War? No way, "fantasyland" according to G.W. We do trust him, right (pun intended)?
Do you trust any President when it comes to nuclear policy, in secret and without our consent? Do you trust this President?
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