“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”

I suppose it was inevitable. The Bush Doctrine of illegal preventive war has never ruled out the use of an unprovoked nuclear attack. So why wouldn’t they use it?

US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.

“That’s the name they’re using,” the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.

A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”

The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.

One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government,” The New Yorker pointed out.

In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.

One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.

But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.

“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.

The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.

“If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle,” the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.

It’s hard to believe they think that they have the political latitude to do this. But then it was hard to believe they thought they had the political latitude to govern as if they had won landslide elections or that they could survive the 2004 election if no WMD were found in Iraq. But they did. In fact, they’ve had their biggest successes by pushing the envelope beyond the point anyone would have imagined. I do not put it past them to believe that they can do this and somehow revive their flagging popularity.

Update: I wonder which top Democrat whose name sounds like Schlieberman the administration has been talking to?

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