War with Iran—a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in
the Middle East—is probable by the end of the Bush administration.
It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration,
claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and
especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its
reign as "the Axis of Evil." They were Iraq, now occupied; North
Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and
Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have
ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped
orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and
who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council.
He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the
Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of
good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of
light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips
most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis
of epic proportions.

These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as
William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky's
doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines
serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those
classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and
fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time
of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States,
slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded
sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.

But this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will
usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic
visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the
president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the
president himself may hold such a vision.

The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in
the Middle East. Iran actually signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. It has violated a codicil of that treaty written by European
foreign ministers, but this codicil was never ratified by the
Iranian parliament. I do not dispute Iran's intentions to acquire
nuclear weapons nor do I minimize the danger should it acquire them
in the estimated five to 10 years. But contrast Iran with Pakistan,
India and Israel. These three countries refused to sign the treaty
and developed nuclear weapons programs in secret. Israel now has an
estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. The word "Dimona," the name of
the city where the nuclear facilities are located in Israel, is
shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli threat to
Muslims' existence. What lessons did the Iranians learn from our
Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies?

Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the
Iranian regime by recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities
inside Iran to rebel, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to
describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other
countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are
making noises about developing a nuclear capacity, and given that,
with the touch of a button Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we
expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps
that the doctrine of permanent war entails making "preemptive" and
unprovoked strikes.

Those in Washington who advocate this war, knowing as little about
the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East,
believe they can hit about 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out
nuclear production and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The
disaster in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air campaign not
only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese behind the
militant group, is dismissed. These ideologues, after all, do not
live in a reality-based universe. The massive Israeli bombing of
Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when
we begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As retired General
Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed out, once you begin an air
campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops
on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in
Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missiles
and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must be
faced—either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protracted
and futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation.

"As a people we are enormously forgetful," Dr. Polk, one of the
country's leading scholars on the Middle East, told an Oct. 13
gathering of the Foreign Policy Association in New York. "We should
have learned from history that foreign powers can't win guerrilla
wars. The British learned this from our ancestors in the American
Revolution and re-learned it in Ireland. Napoleon learned it in
Spain. The Germans learned it in Yugoslavia. We should have learned
it in Vietnam and the Russians learned it in Afghanistan and are
learning it all over again in Chechnya and we are learning it, of
course, in Iraq. Guerrilla wars are almost unwinnable. As a people
we are also very vain. Our way of life is the only way. We should
have learned that the rich and powerful can't always succeed against
the poor and less powerful."

An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian
oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in
the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel.
The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating,
very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million
Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite
communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us
and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased
terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread
sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks
now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and
Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.

The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be
Israel. And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of
themselves as allies of the Jewish state. A conflagration of this
magnitude could see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a
regional war, one that would over time spell the final chapter in
the Zionist experiment in the Middle East. The Israelis aptly call
their nuclear program "the Samson option." The Biblical Samson
ripped down the pillars of the temple and killed everyone around
him, along with himself.

If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left
behind with the nonbelievers, then this news should cheer you up. If
you are rational, however, these may be some of the last few weeks
or months in which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying
republic and way of life.

Chris Hedges is former Middle East bureau chief for The New York
Times and author of the bestseller "War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning" reports on Bush's plan for Iran, and how a callous war,
conceived by zealots, will lead to a disaster of biblical
proportions.