It’s Like Déjà Vu All Over Again

Drums, bitchez:

Iran remained defiant Thursday as a U.N. deadline arrived for it to halt uranium enrichment, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said unanimity among the Security Council was not needed to take action against Tehran.

Key European nations will meet with Iran in September in a last-ditch effort to seek a negotiated solution to the standoff over Tehran's refusal to freeze uranium enrichment, a senior U.N. diplomat said Thursday.

President Bush said "there must be consequences" for Iran, adding that the war between Tehran-backed Hezbollah militants and Israel demonstrated that "the world now faces a grave threat from the radical regime in Iran."

I think they’re playing “Exchange a Letter,” too. N for Q.

And guess what? I have precisely the same questions/objections I had during the first verse of this song. Where is the unassailable evidence from the intelligence community proving the administration’s claims of the “grave threat” that necessitates an immediate action? Once again, it doesn’t exist.

Last August, the first major review since 2001 of what is known and what is unknown about Iran found that “that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon,” and represented “consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies” and a total contrast to “forceful public statements by the White House.” Back in April, Stephen Rademaker, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, claimed Iran could produce a nuclear bomb in 16 days. Huh. That’s quite a fucking disparity, no?

The House Intelligence Committee thinks so, too. Last week, they issued a report warning against uncritically marching down the same road to a war in Iran as we did to war in Iraq, asserting “American intelligence agencies do not know nearly enough about Iran's nuclear weapons program” and that information "regarding potential Iranian chemical weapons and biological weapons programs is neither voluminous nor conclusive" and “little evidence has been gathered to tie Iran to al-Qaeda and to the recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.”

What’s that? It almost sounds like the administration is pushing an agenda rooted in inconclusive intelligence on both WMDs and terror ties. Gee, that has a familiar ring.

And, like I’ve said before, all the assumptions in the world can’t substitute as evidence. If we need to take action against Iran, then fine. But that need must be determined by rigorous analysis of facts, not by the Bush Gut, or pants-wetting fears about what could be, or the salivation of warmongers, or anything else. This administration has already blown it big time once.

No doubt Ahmadinejad is a nutball. But is he a nutball tiger with teeth, or with just a roaring bravado masking his lack of them? (To use a contemporary reference, is he a nutball who actually killed a blond little pageant princess, or a nutball who just claims to have killed her?) Before the Iraq war, the suggestion that Saddam was a toothless tiger was considered laughable—and yet, it was right. Saddam was the John Mark Karr of despots—an odious, nasty dude with a wicked history, and totally innocent of the current crimes he himself professed to commit. We've got a bad track record following such men down the trails they want us to go, and we need to be sure we're not making the same mistake again.