Beware Bush's Phony Crisis on Iran
Bush is elevating Iran into a crisis situation. But there is no crisis. Josh Marshall calls it correctly.
The only crisis with Iran is the crisis with the president's public approval ratings. Period. End of story. The Iranians are years, probably as long as a decade away, and possibly even longer from creating even a limited yield nuclear weapon. Ergo, the only reason to ramp up a confrontation now is to help the president's poll numbers.....The period of peril the country is entering into isn't tied to an Iranian bomb. It turns on how far a desperate president will go to avoid losing control of Congress.
[Via Atrios.] As Juan Cole reports, the IAEA report (pdf) released Friday found no proof of an Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program. Iran has promised to cooperate with weapons inspectors and insists it is only acquiring uranium for nuclear power, not nuclear bombs.
Matt Yglesias weighs in with how Democrats should frame the debate. One of his commenters responds:
The Democratic Party position should be that our big problem for the future is learning how to handle disputes diplomatically, and not militarily; how to maintain our security in a world with an ever increasing number of nations with the capability of making nuclear weapons, and how to persuade the world go join in a method for tracking all bomb grade material in the world, so as to prevent terrorists from obtaining any. We need to to emphasize that an administration serious about nuclear proliferation would have spent the past 6 years working with Russia and the other ex-USSR states to render harmless the vast stores of nuclear weapons and weapon grade materials the USSR left behind. This administration didn't do that.
I am no fan of Iran. Particularly, its anti-Israel policies. But fear-mongering by Bush is not the way to solve the problem. Diplomacy is. But either Bush's cabinet members are not up to the task, or Bush is determined to cause a "regime change" in Iran by getting us involved in another war.
There is no way that Iran can build a nuclear bomb in 16 days as a state department official claimed a few weeks ago. If you haven't yet read it, check out Seymour Hersh's The Iran Plan in the New Yorker. Bush is already planning for war with Iran.
Every time I hear Bush or the neo-cons on Iran, I think "elevated terror threat." It's too bad, because someday there really could be a threat, but Bush will be the little boy who cried wolf once too many times and no one will listen.
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