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Thursday, April 20, 2006

Let's try to understand this Iran nonsense

I don't for a minute believe that Iran is capable of making nuclear weapons any time soon. I suspect that they wish they could, since that has been proven to be the only effective protection against US invasion (consider Pakistan and North Korea, and compare with Afghanistan and Iraq--the lesson is quite clear). But they can't, and won't be able to for years. But let's suppose that Condiliar's worst lies are true--that Iran is minutes away from having a nuke and turning it over to some terrorist organization.

And then consider the country with far and away the most potent nuclear arsenal in the world, which continues to develop weapons (at a rate much faster than Iran can manage, I'm sure), which has multiple delivery options (ICBM's, sub and ship launched missiles, aircraft, artillery, even our own terrorist infiltrators with suitcase bombs), and was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is still the only one to have used them. Does this country have any moral standing at all to tell other nations not to have nukes? Of course not. But let's pretend we're Bushies and believe that every horrible thing we do or might do is ordained by God, so this is okay too.

So--supposing that Iran really has a bomb, and has ties to terrorists. Does that make it imperative that we attack them right now, or else we're at grave risk? Well, consider that Pakistan has had nuclear bombs for eight years, was basically the incubator for al Qaeda and the Taliban, is still a hotbed for Islamic extremism and quite possibly is harboring Osama bin Laden right now. Pakistan has also participated actively in proliferating nuclear technology, including apparently to Iran. If Iran is a threat, then how much greater a threat is Pakistan? Bush, and Clinton for that matter, have left us exposed to the possible smoking gun/mushroom cloud for eight years!

Now of course I don't think we should attack Pakistan--they and we have more than enough trouble without that. But if anything points out the hypocrisy of W's "policies," it would be identifying Iraq and Iran as threats while ignoring Pakistan.

And if Iran is actually a threat, then we have been in imminent danger of destruction for years or decades. If Iran could give one of it's hypothetical nukes to terrorists, any other nuclear power could just as easily give one or more of its very real nukes to terrorists. Great Britain, France, Israel, Russia (and perhaps other former Soviet Republics), Pakistan, India, China, North Korea--all have reasons, ranging from pure hatred to jealousy to economic advantage to self-defense to justice, to want to see the US brought down a few pegs. And while their current governments may for the most part be sane enough not to try a sneak nuclear attack on the US, there could certainly be factions in those countries willing and possibly able to pull it off. They would of course run it as a false-flag operation. How simple would it be for an agent from France or Israel or China to bring a nuke into this country, leave a few clues lying around written in Farsi, and set the thing off? I would hope it wouldn't be easy, but by suggesting that Iran, with no nukes at all so far, is some sort of threat to us, the Bushies are implicitly saying that we have no protection in place against such an attack--in fact our only plan to prevent such an attack is to serially destroy countries that couldn't pull it off!

Any politician or journalist (and it seems to be most of them) who claims that Iran is a serious threat to the United States is really saying that the trillions of dollars spent on "defense" in recent decades have been entirely wasted. If one country on the other side of the world with a few dozen centrifuges is a grave danger to our nation, then we have no defense.