Joe Galloway

Is not happy:

Does anyone suppose that we can send bombers to strike Iran's nuclear enrichment plants - widely dispersed and dug deeply into the granite under mountains - and not expect that action to set the Middle East on fire and paralyze economies at home and abroad by sending the price of oil beyond $100 or even $200 a barrel?

Does anyone think that Iran's ayatollahs wouldn't signal Iraqi Shiite militias and Iran's own deeply embedded commando teams inside Iraqi to launch new and deadly attacks against our troops scattered across the Iraqi battlegrounds and cut our long and vulnerable supply lines that feed, fuel and provide ammunition to our forces? And what signals might the Iranians send to their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon and beyond, and to their Shiite allies in western Afghanistan?

The Iraq Study Group certainly urged the Bush administration to engage with Iran and Syria, but they recommended diplomatic engagement, not military engagements.

Throwing an additional 21,500 American troops into the cauldron that is the Iraq civil war is not a new way forward. It's not even new: We've done this several times before, and it won't work.

Expanding a war that we're losing in Iraq to a neighboring nation three times larger, with a much better army and far more whacked-out religious fanatics, is hardly something that our commander in chief should even be dropping hints about at this juncture in a growing disaster.

Good God, man, what were you thinking during the last six weeks of supposedly listening to advice from all comers? Is this the best you can do?

Just when we begin to think that things couldn't get much worse, they do.

Pardon me if I'm reminded of a time long ago when another disaster of a president, Richard M. Nixon, thought that he could turn a losing war in Vietnam around by bombing and invading neighboring Cambodia.

It didn't work in Cambodia. It only set the stage for a Communist Khmer Rouge genocide that took as many as 2 million Cambodian lives after Indochina fell.

Perhaps it's time for all of us to hope for a miracle. We can all hope, and pray too, that this commander in chief comes to his senses before he sets our world afire in the two years he has left in the highest office in the land.