In today's LA Times, Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute urges the USA to bomb Iran while Bush is still in office or face the consequences:
"...Bush has said that history's judgment on his conduct of the war against terror is more important than the polls. If Ahmadinejad gets his finger on a nuclear trigger, everything Bush has done will be rendered hollow. We will be a lot less safe than we were when Bush took office...
Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him."
Consider the bold assertions in just the few sentences I excerpted:
- Communism gave rise to fascism and Nazism.
- There's a "solid" legacy of achievement in Iraq and Afghanistan that can be "rendered hollow."
- Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin.
Without any intelligence to cherry-pick, Muravchik resorts instead to cherry -picking from questionable news stories:
"The reality is that we cannot live safely with a nuclear-armed Iran. One reason is terrorism, of which Iran has long been the world's premier state sponsor, through groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Now, according to a report last week in London's Daily Telegraph, Iran is trying to take over Al Qaeda by positioning its own man, Saif Adel, to become the successor to the ailing Osama bin Laden. How could we possibly trust Iran not to slip nuclear material to terrorists?"
The story that Muravchik refers to in the Daily Telegraph is sourced only to "western intelligence officials." It sounds like a real news story when you only cite it though. And those western intelligence officials should probably let the CIA know that Osama is still alive: the CIA disbanded the unit that had been hunting for Osama for ten years in July of 2006.
I could go on and on but the point is that even though attempts to game the midterm-elections were only partially successful, the cheerleaders for war have no plans to go gentle into that good night. Now it's clear that their deadline is not the constantly shrinking window of time it would take Iran to develop a nuclear weapon (*10 years* according to a National Intelligence Estimate in August of 2005), but the time remaining in Bush's term.
(And I'm disappointed in the LATimes too.)
http://www.latimes.com/...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
http://select.nytimes.com/...