Wanna scare yourself shitless?

Read the transcript of this Sy Hersh interview with Democracy Now. The post is long, but Hersh says some very important things. You'll probably want to read the entire transcript.

First, on Bush's motivation for the war:

George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he’s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him.

So no amount of protest will help, and neither will the screaming of the rest of the world.

He feels the same way about the neocons as I do.

One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is.

Fortunately, Feith announced his resignation. One down, eight to go.

The next paragraph contains some new details. First, there are no embedded reporters at Doha in Qatar. Guess that Control Room didn't provide them the PR they wanted. Next, there are no embeds at the Harry Truman, either. Nobody knows how much bombing we're doing. Add to this the conventional wisdom that no Western Reporters will brave the Sunni triangle, and we're really missing a lot of critical information here.

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights.

He also talks about one of the changes in the new warfare. Death rates are lower in this conflict because the medics have gotten so much better at keeping people alive. Better body armor saves a lot of lives, but many of these soldiers who live are suffering with horrible injuries, and many are in a vegetative state. The toll is far worse than the 1586 people who have died.

And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities.

He also talked about the economy, the trade deficit and the falling dollar.

It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.

Really scary stuff, and it seems as though the the administration really doesn't grasp what we're up against here.