Unfortunately, the White House has been relocated to an alternate universe, where news that Iran has no active program and stopped the one they did have four years ago is ammunition AGAINST Iran.
"I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program," Bush said. "The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it."President Bush on Iran
"To me, the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community _ to continue to rally the community _ to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program," the president said. "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program."
He also asserted that the report means "nothing's changed," focusing on the previous existence of a weapons program and not addressing the discrepancy between his rhetoric and the disclosure that weapons program has been frozen for four years.
I view this as a call to arms. Clearly we had better gear up for action against Germany and Japan immediately! What's to say that they won't rearm and invade their neighbors again? And we haven't heard from that Attila the Hun guy in a while. Seems to me like he's up to something. We should also invade the Klingon Empire ASAP. What's to say they won't create themselves and start attacking our colonies and starships?
Wake me up when we're back in our regular universe.
1 comment:
Well, in fairness, the report said they had stopped the weapons program in 2003. Since then, Ahmadinejad has taken power and, even granting that he doesn't necessarily call the shots, things might have changed. That doesn't justify Bush's call that WW III is about to happen but I also don't think you can simply say everything is ok now and nothing to worry about. I suspect there is an ongoing debate within the power structures in Iran about whether or not to make weapons. The anti-weapon side won in 2003 but it might not in the future. Plus, the line between an weapons and non-weapons nuclear program is pretty thin. Even if they don't have a present intention to build weapons, it wouldn't be that hard to reverse course. The problem is that Bush's lack of credibility makes it difficult to pursue a reasonable policy that is vigilant but not hysterical toward Iran. This should, in theory, make it easier for Bush to actually talk to Iran but, of course, it won't. He has managed to screw up both the hard line and soft line positions and make our policy completely incoherent.
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