Actually, he asks "a few pertinent questions". I can suggest the answers to them:
Has the White House lost its collective mind?
Pretty much.
Do the president and his minions believe that Americans can be stampeded into another needless war to save his party from the consequences of the catastrophe in Iraq?
Yep.
Is the Bush administration seriously thinking of bombing Iran for political purposes?
Do they ever make decisions on any other basis?
[Seriously thinking of] a nuclear strike?
Yes.
Is it actually possible, as has been said, that George W. Bush believes himself to be on a divine, messianic mission?
Yes.
Lyons stops at this point to reflect on the implications.
He writes:
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then our democracy may be sleepwalking into its worst crisis since the Civil War. A pre-emptive strike on Iran, because it might hypothetically develop nuclear weapons five or 10 years hence, would be a naked act of aggression. Not to mention an offense against the U. S. Constitution.
He then continues with questions:
On what authority would Bush make war on a nation that played no role in 9/11, bears enmity toward al-Qa'ida and has never seriously threatened to attack the United States?
Bush is the decider. That means he gets to decide.
His own God's?
Of course. I believe God speaks directly to our Dear Leader. The problem is, God's speaking Hebrew, and Bush is doing his own translations. And he's doing a huckuva job with those translations, I tell you.
Lyons notes that Iran presents no imminent danger. Not to the US, not to Israel, not to Europe. And he warns:
Yet many of the same keyboard commandoes who orchestrated the propaganda campaign that drove the U. S. into Iraq are beating war drums. Scary "intelligence" claims again proliferate. The same geniuses who claimed to know the precise location of Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction now warn us of Iran’s double-secret arms programs. Full-page ads have appeared in newspapers in the U. S. and Europe conjuring the prospect of Iranian nuclear attacks against Israel and the West, an entirely imaginary scenario.
The other day Bush, sounding like a Valley Girl, told a California audience he'd tried to avoid war with Iraq "diplomatically to the max," a falsehood so brazen that it’s almost tempting to fear he believes it. Given that British government documents portray Bush discussing with Prime Minister Tony Blair how to justify an attack against Saddam Hussein in early 2003, it's reasonable to wonder what schemes he’s conjuring now. He also credited "the Almighty" as the inspiration for his foreign policy.
He ends by citing the military historian that I quoted a few days ago:
More recently, the eminent Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has cautioned that hysterical warnings about this or that country - Russia, China, Pakistan, India - developing nuclear weapons have occurred regularly since Hiroshima. Yet the taboo against their actual use has held, partly because rational actors know that even the "tactical" weapons which Bush administration toughs fantasize about are upward of 10 times more powerful than the A-bombs dropped on Japan. Also because, van Creveld makes clear, deterrence works. Israel, he writes, "can quickly turn Tehran into a radioactive desert - a fact of which Iranians are fully aware." To violate that taboo would justifiably turn the U. S. into a pariah state. It would all but guarantee eventual retaliation in kind. Even a conventional bombing campaign against Iran would, at minimum, send world oil prices skyrocketing, with disastrous economic consequences. Real patriots must prevent this madness from happening. The generals are speaking out. Where are the Democrats and the sane Republicans?
Answer to the last question: The Dems are more worried about trying to appear "tough" than about preventing Bush widening the disaster now known simply as the Iraq War. And there are essentially no sane Republicans left in Congress - or, at least, none willing to openly fight Bush over his disastrous foreign policy. Libertarian/isolationist Republican Rep. Ron Paul has been an exception to the latter. A rare, rare exception.
