Newsflash: Wikileaks Verify That Saddam Hussein Had WMD AFTER George W. Bush Invaded Iraq

It’s really quite remarkable what the mainstream media gatekeepers somehow think isn’t worth reporting.

I would not have come across this story at all had I not been investigating the site of Questioning with boldness (his article link is here). 

Here’s the story Questioning with Boldess links to (I add the bold font):

WikiLeaks docs prove Saddam had WMD, threats remain
by Seth Mandel
October 28, 2010

WikiLeaks’ latest publication of Iraq war documents contains a lot of information that most reasonable people would prefer remained unknown, such as the names of Iraqi informants who will now be hunted for helping the U.S.

And although the anti-war left welcomed the release of the documents, they would probably cringe at one of the most significant finds of this latest crop of reports: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

“By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Wired magazine’s Danger Room reports. “But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.”

That is, there definitively were weapons of mass destruction and elements of a WMD program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq when U.S.-led coalition troops entered the country to depose Hussein.

Predictably, the liberal media did their best to either ignore the story–like the New York Times and Washington Post did–or spin it. It’s not an easy choice to make, since ignoring the story makes you look out of the loop and hurts your reputation as an informative publication, yet spinning the story means actively attempting to confuse and mislead your readers. CBS News chose the latter.

“WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs: No Evidence of Massive WMD Caches” read the headline on CBS News’ online. Here is the story’s opening paragraph:

“The nearly 400,000 Iraq war log documents released by WikiLeaks on Friday were full of evidence of abuses, civilian deaths and the chaos of war, but clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction–the Bush administration’s justification for invading Iraq–appears to be missing.”

There are two falsehoods in that sentence, demonstrating the difficulty in trying to spin a clear fact. The Bush administration’s justification for invading Iraq was much broader than WMD–in fact, it was similar to the litany of reasons the Clinton administration signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which specifically called for regime change in Iraq as the official policy of the United States government (Iraq had repeatedly violated international law, Iraq had failed to comply with the obligations that ended the Gulf War, Iraq had circumvented U.N. resolutions, etc.).

“If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow,” President Clinton said in February 1998. “Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.”

The second falsehood was the phrase “appears to be missing.” In August 2004, American soldiers seized a toxic “blister agent,” a chemical weapon used since the First World War, Wired reported. In Anbar province, they discovered a chemical lab and a “chemical cache.” Three years later, U.S. military found buried WMD, and even as recent as 2008 found chemical munitions.

This isn’t the first time Iraq war documents shattered a media myth about Saddam’s regime. In 2008, a Pentagon study of Iraqi documents, as well as audio and video recordings, revealed connections between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Called the Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP), the report–based on more than 600,000 captured original documents and thousands of hours of audio and video recordings–proved conclusively that Saddam had worked with terrorist organizations that were plotting attacks on American targets around the world.

One way to identify a media narrative in deep trouble is the naked attempt to draw conclusions for the reader instead of just presenting the story. The CBS report on the leaked WMD documents is a case in point of the reporter telling the reader what they ought to think, knowing full well that otherwise the facts of the case would likely lead the reader to the opposite conclusion.

“At this point,” CBS reporter Dan Farber desperately pleads, “history will still record that the Bush administration went into Iraq under an erroneous threat assessment that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing and hoarding weapons of mass destruction.”

That’s as close as the liberal mainstream media will get to admitting they were wrong. It’s their version of a confession. The myth that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was WMD-free has met its demise.

And these weapons couldn’t simply be the lost scraps of Saddam’s attempts to destroy the stockpile, as Ed Morrissey points out.

“Had Saddam Hussein wanted those weapons destroyed, no lower-ranking military officer would have dared defy him by keeping them hidden,” he writes. “It would have taken dozens of officers to conspire to move and hide those weapons, as well as a like number of enlisted men, any and all of whom could have been a spy for the Hussein clique.”

But now that we’ve answered the question of whether there were actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–there were and are–we may have a more significant question to answer: Who has possession of these weapons now?

“But the more salient issue may be how insurgents and Islamic extremists (possibly with the help of Iran) attempted to use these lethal and exotic arms,” Wired reports. In 2006, for example, “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons were brought in from Iran.

“That same month, then ‘chemical weapons specialists’ were apprehended in Balad,” the Wired report continues. “These ‘foreigners’ were there specifically ‘to support the chemical weapons operations.’ The following month, an intelligence report refers to a ‘chemical weapons expert’ that ‘provided assistance with the gas weapons.’ What happened to that specialist, the WikiLeaked document doesn’t say.”

Seth Mandel is the Washington DC based correspondent of Weekly Blitz.

Figures.

Given the fact that Saddam Hussein obviously had WMD prior to the invasion (it is a documented fact of history that he used them against Iran in their war, and it is a documented fact of history that Saddam used WMD on his own people in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988).

It is also a fact of history that prior to George W. Bush invading Iraq in 2003, inspectors had been kicked out of Iraq by Saddam for over four years, having been expelled by Saddam Hussein in 1998 during the Clinton administration.

Given the simple fact that Iraq is a country the size of Texas, and given the fact that Iraq knew full well exactly when US and allied satellites passed over their country, and given the fact that Saddam Hussein’s own generals believed that Iraq in fact did possess WMD –

March 13, 2006
NY Times: Saddam’s generals believed they had WMD to repel US
By Jim Kouri

The New York Times reports that just prior to the United States lead invasion, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein informed his top generals that he had destroyed his stockpiles of chemical weapons three months before their war plans meeting.

According to the Times report, the generals all believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and were counting on the WMD to repel the oncoming coalition invaders.

While reporting on this story, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly said he is not surprised that the CIA and other nations believed Saddam had WMD since Hussein’s own generals believed they had them. He said that this proves President Bush did not lie and that he believed what Saddam’s own generals believed — that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

O’Reilly also rhetorically asked when the Democrat Senators Reid, Kennedy, Durbin and others would apologize for calling President Bush a liar about WMD. He also asked when liberals such as Barbara Streisand, Jessica Lange and other would apologize to Bush for calling him a liar. […]

– you will explain to me how we know that Iraq didn’t have WMD how, exactly???

I mean, you dug up the entire country, did you?

Given the type of murderous crazy dictator thug Saddam was, and given the fact that he clearly had possesed WMD, and given the fact that he had in fact kicked out all the weapons inspectors from a country the size of Texas for more than four years, it would seem a no-brainer that the burden of proof clearly rested with the side that claimed that Saddam Hussein had entirely abandoned his WMD arsenal and program.  Which pretty much proves my contention that liberals truly don’t have any brains.  They are people who literally will themselves to be truly stupid; they determine to believe a depraved and asinine worldview that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality by sheer brute force of will.

That explains why so many American university professors continue to be Marxists (nearly one in five!!!) even though Marxism couldn’t have been proven to be more completely wrong and immoral both as an economic and as a political system.

Liberals are people who live in a bubble-world.  They live in a world of their own theories, and hate the real world.  And if the facts don’t fit their theories, well, they dominate the media and get to write the news stories, don’t they???

It is a good thing that journalists are atheists, because that means they don’t have to worry about the fact that one day they will burn in hell forever and ever for their rabid bias and dishonesty.

Don’t Think ObamaCare Won’t Be A Giant Black Hole Of Debt

You will be hearing about the Democrats “paying” for their health care takeover.  Don’t believe it.  Again and again and again, Democrats have sold one health care boondoggle after another, claiming that it will “only” cost such-and-so.  They have a perfect track record — of failure to live up to their claims.

Health Costs and History
Government programs always exceed their spending estimates.

Washington has just run a $1.4 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2009, even as we are told a new health-care entitlement will reduce red ink by $81 billion over 10 years. To believe that fantastic claim, you have to ignore everything we know about Washington and the history of government health-care programs. For the record, we decided to take a look at how previous federal forecasts matched what later happened. It isn’t pretty.

Let’s start with the claim that a more pervasive federal role will restrain costs and thus make health care more affordable. We know that over the past four decades precisely the opposite has occurred. Prior to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, health-care inflation ran slightly faster than overall inflation. In the years since, medical inflation has climbed 2.3 times faster than cost increases elsewhere in the economy. Much of this reflects advances in technology and expensive treatments, but the contrast does contradict the claim of government as a benign cost saver.

Next let’s examine the record of Congressional forecasters in predicting costs.  Start with Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for the poor. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that its first-year costs would be $238 million. Instead it hit more than $1 billion, and costs have kept climbing.

Thanks in part to expansions promoted by California’s Henry Waxman, a principal author of the current House bill, Medicaid now costs 37 times more than it did when it was launched—after adjusting for inflation. Its current cost is $251 billion, up 24.7% or $50 billion in fiscal 2009 alone, and that’s before the health-care bill covers millions of new beneficiaries.

Medicare has a similar record. In 1965, Congressional budgeters said that it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Its actual cost that year was $90 billion. Whoops.  The hospitalization program alone was supposed to cost $9 billion but wound up costing $67 billion.  These aren’t small forecasting errors. The rate of increase in Medicare spending has outpaced overall inflation in nearly every year (up 9.8% in 2009), so a program that began at $4 billion now costs $428 billion.

The Medicare program for renal disease was originally estimated in 1973 to cover 11,000 participants. Today it covers 395,000, at a cost of $22 billion. The 1988 Medicare home-care benefit was supposed to cost $4 billion by 1993, but the actual cost was $10 billion, because many more people participated than expected. This is nearly always the case with government programs because their entitlement nature—accepting everyone who meets the age or income limits—means there’s no fixed annual budget.

One of the few health-care entitlements that has come in well below the original estimate is the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill. Those costs are now about one-third below the original projections, according to the Medicare actuaries. Part of the reason is lower than expected participation by seniors and savings from generic drugs.

But as White House budget director Peter Orszag told Congress when he ran the Congressional Budget Office, the “primary cause” of these cost savings is that “the pricing is coming in better than anticipated, and that is likely a reflection of the competition that’s occurring in the private market.” The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agrees, stating that “the drug plans competing for Medicare beneficiaries have been able to establish greater than expected savings from aggressive price negotiation.” It adds that when given choices “beneficiaries have overwhelmingly selected less costly drug plans.”

Yet liberal Democrats fought that private-competition model (preferring government drug price controls), just as they are trying to prevent private health plans from competing across state borders now.

The lesson here is that spending on nearly all federal benefit programs grows relentlessly once they are established. This history won’t stop Democrats bent on ramming their entitlement into law. But every Member who votes for it is guaranteeing larger deficits and higher taxes far into the future. Count on it.

You should notice the bit about the prescription drug benefit passed under Bush, because Democrats have routinely demonized it.  They claim that Republicans didn’t even TRY to pay for it, but merely increased the deficit.  That is for the most part true, but at least it a) relied upon the private sector to provide the benefit, and b) didn’t socialize the entire economy in the process.  Democrats argue that, unlike Republicans with the prescription drug benefit, they are trying to “pay” for their plan.  Just as right now I am flapping my arms and trying to fly out of my chair.

As much as Democrats want to demonize the Bush prescription drug benefit, it remains the anomaly as being the ONLY government health care program that ran under budget, as opposed to ten times budget.

We can’t allow the Medicare system to collapse, as it is on the verge of doing.  Too many elderly people who don’t have recourse to anything else are counting on it.  But the gigantic hole of red ink is proof that we never should have started this program until we truly counted the cost.  Had the government not foisted Medicare upon us, the private market would have solved the problem better.

Anybody who thinks we can save one giant government program by creating an even more giant government program is a fool.  It is the mindset of one who believes the best way to get out of a hole is to dig deeper and faster.

The health care plan that the Democrats are envisioning will be a FAR greater black hole of debt than anything this country has ever seen.  Because it is FAR more ambitious, involves FAR more people, and involves a FAR greater takeover of the US economy.

And, incredibly, the Democrats are literally using the argument of the skyrocketing deficit to enact something that will massively increase our deficits.

Their mindset is the same mindset that deals with our exploding debts by constantly raising the debt ceiling so we can keep on borrowing and borrowing and borrowing.  That fixes the problem, doesn’t it?

We are facing the largest federal deficits since World War II.  That should really scare you, because in World War II, it was AMERICANS who held that debt by purchasing war bonds.  Back then, Americans actually saved their money.  Quite different from these days, when we routinely go into debt to buy a lot of crap that we don’t need.  Today it is CHINA who holds our debt.  So as we begin to contemplate the $800 billion a year in interest payments that we will soon be paying, we realize that we are no longer our own masters.

If that isn’t bad enough, consider this: at the end of World War II, the United States had the greatest manufacturing and industrial base the world had ever seen.  Today, we have only a tiny fraction of that former capability.  In addition to being a debtor nation, we are also a “service” nation.  You don’t spend your way out of debt; you don’t even service your way out of debt.  You produce your way out of debt.  We have long since lost the capability to do that.

Finally, the debts accrued during World War II were debts that were a) necessary and b) temporary.  That, also, is no longer true today.  Our World War II debts were the result of our war of necessity against the greatest evil humankind had ever seen; the debts we are experiencing today are the result of our war against our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children as we demand more and more benefits at somebody’s else’s expense.

As a result of American power following World War II, the U.S. dollar became the fundamental world currency, and English became the official lingua franca of the global economy.  Tragically, as a result of the rapid American collapse, the U.S. dollar is now on the verge of being expunged from the global stage, and English is increasingly not being spoken even in America.

Obama Making World Safer For America’s Enemies

What would be an obvious follow-up for Obama’s well-received “Apologize for America” tour?

Why, a “Disarming America” tour, of course.

Barack Obama ready to slash US nuclear arsenal: Pentagon told to map out radical cuts as president prepares to chair UN talks

Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country’s arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.

Obama has rejected the Pentagon’s first draft of the “nuclear posture review” as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials. […]

The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: “Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president’s weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role.”

The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.

That bargain is at the heart of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which is up for review next year amid signs it is unravelling in the face of Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.

In an article for the Guardian today, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, argues that failure to win a consensus would be disastrous. “This is one of the most critical issues we face,” the foreign secretary writes. “Get it right, and we will increase global security, pave the way for a world without nuclear weapons, and improve access to affordable, safe and dependable energy – vital to tackle climate change. Get it wrong, and we face the spread of nuclear weapons and the chilling prospect of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.” […]

Barack Obama’s first foreign policy instinct is, as always, horrifyingly wrong.  When Russia recently invaded Georgia, committing ethnic cleansing and destroying democracy there in the process, Obama issued an incredibly weak, pandering, and yes, appeasing, statement which he later shifted to appear stronger than he was.

More recently, continuing the trend, Obama backed down to Russia’s threats and betrayed an American commitment to Poland and Czechoslovakia to “celebrate” the 70th anniversary of Russia’s brutal invasion of Poland.

Russia stared, and Obama blinked.  And cringed.

It is a crystal clear continuation to a program to alienate allies even as it bolsters enemies that I described months ago.  The world now sees America under Barack Obama as toothless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend.

Now, this same man who vowed to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons – but doing absolutely nothing to keep them from this present moment as they now have the ability to make a bomb – is now basically saying that the only nuclear weapons he’s going to stop are OURS.

In his April 16th, 2008 debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama promised:

“I have said I will do whatever is required to prevent the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

But he did nothing.  NOTHING.  And now Iran has them at their whim.

And, in The Jerusalem Post’s words:

The Iranians have already called Obama’s bluff. An Iranian newspaper referred to the American agenda on July 26 this way: “[T]he Obama administration is prepared to accept the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran… They have no long-term plan for dealing with Iran… Their strategy consists of begging us to talk with them.”

Well, too bad the “begging” strategery didn’t work.  We had such high hopes for it.  We figured, well, it didn’t work when Neville Chamberlain tried it with Adolf Hitler, so it’s bound to succeed now.

Who would have thunk that such a weak and pathetic policy of appeasement would fail yet again?

Iran has been working on developing nuclear weapons for years.  It stopped its program in 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, because they didn’t want to be next.  And the only “deterrent” which was ever going to have any chance of succeeding in stopping Iran’s nuclear program was the blunt promise of massive and overwhelming military force unless Iran verifiably cease its nuclear weapons program.  Which was never issued.

Now, this same man who vowed to stay tough in Afghanistan – and who is already buckling at the knees now that “the good war” is HIS war – is hard at work to undermine our national security even more by giving away our nuclear deterrent.

Charles Krauthammer recently cited Democrat strategist and Kerry ‘04 campaigner Bob Shrum’s describing Afghanistan as the “right war” as a tactic to attack Bush in Iraq while not being “anti-war.”  It was an incredibly cynical strategy from an incredibly cynical political party.  And it was a strategy that Barack Obama clearly embraced as well.  Frankly, anyone who believed that the Democrat Party would do the right thing for the right reasons in Afghanistan was simply deluded.

A recent article entitled, “Pentagon worried about Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan” ended with this assessment from a senior Pentagon official:

“I think they (the Obama administration) thought this would be more popular and easier.  We are not getting a Bush-like commitment to this war.”

And this is the guy who is making sweeping and fundamental changes to “radically” undermine our nuclear deterrent?

Iran And The Bomb: What Are We Going To Do?

Remember that National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program five years ago? A December 2007 Washington Post article cast it this way:

A major U.S. intelligence review has concluded that Iran stopped work on a suspected nuclear weapons program more than four years ago, a stark reversal of previous intelligence assessments that Iran was actively moving toward a bomb.

The new findings, drawn from a consensus National Intelligence Estimate, reflected a surprising shift in the midst of the Bush administration’s continuing political and diplomatic campaign to depict Tehran’s nuclear development as a grave threat. The report was drafted after an extended internal debate over the reliability of communications intercepts of Iranian conversations this past summer that suggested the program had been suspended.

If Iran ever truly did in fact suspend its nuclear weapons program, it did so immediately after – and obviously as a direct result of – the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Understandably Iran didn’t want to be the next country to face the consequences for illegal weapons programs.

When the story came out that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program (the one Iran claimed it never had in the first place), Democrats and liberals immediately pounced all over President Bush’s claim that Iran continued to represent a nuclear weapons threat. President Bush was called a liar, he was called a warmonger, for continuing to describe Iran as a threat. The left openly mocked conservatives for calling for a tough stance against Iran. We didn’t need to worry about Iran, they said.

The Washington Post claimed that Iran was actually ten years from developing the bomb.

Given these reports, liberals made the argument that any “threat” from Iran was theoretical or academic. And President Bush was merely proving that he was the paranoid neo-con that they had been casting him as all along.

When Barack Obama initially said that Iran did not represent a threat, he was merely assuming the longstanding standard doctrinaire liberal mentality. It was only when he began to be presented with the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that he “refined” his remarks to acknowledge that Iran was in fact a threat.

In any event, as the United States began to succomb to increasing internal division over the war in Iraq, and as the United States began to bog down, the facts now overwhelmingly reveal that Iran clearly decided to restart its nuclear weapons program.

How long until Iran develops enough nuclear material to build a bomb? Ten years, like the elite media says?

Try six months to one year. That abstract academic threat is getting real concrete and very, very real.

Israel has been warning for some time now that Iran could have the bomb far more quickly than many Western experts were willing to acknowledge. They’ve been claiming that Iran could have enough material to build a bomb far earlier than most estimates stated. But they were ignored. After all, in the leftist view of the world, Israel is the biggest and most paranoid warmonger of all (or at least a very close second to the United States).

But now someone else is affirming that President Bush and the state of Israel were right all along.

And it’s not some neo-con warmonger saying this but none other than the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei:

Mohamed ElBaradei: “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT, expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least… Considering the number of centrifuges and the quantity of uranium Iran has…”

Interviewer: “How much time would it need?”

ElBaradei: “It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up one morning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

Interviewer: “Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months…”

ElBaradei: “Or one year, at least…”

Interviewer: “… to produce [nuclear] weapons?”

ElBaradei: “It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon.”

Sadly, ElBaradei – in the words of one writer – “seems to be more obsessed with politics than with doing his job. His job is to monitor the nuclear developments of countries, such as Iran, and to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons. That’s what he should be concerned about. Instead, he’s concerned with what countries may do when other countries ignore the UN and develop nuclear weapons regardless of world opinion.” Mohamed ElBaradei has claimed that any attack on Iran would be “unnecessary” and that he would resign if such an attack were to occur. That’s a pretty political statement from a supposedly apolitical weapons inspector.

And meanwhile Iran is getting closer and closer to the bomb with each passing day.

What would happen if Iran actually got the bomb? Many pooh pooh the possibility that Iran would start World War III by attacking an also nuclear-armed Israel. But only a fool would ignore the numerous “death to Israel” statements from both Iran’s president and its Ayatollah. What is particular frightening is that these Iranian rulers hold to an apocalyptic interpretation of Islam which holds to the doctrine that the last Imam will return during a period of crisis.

But Iran doesn’t actually have to use its nuclear weapons to make use of them. Ask yourself: would the United States dare attack a nuclear Iran? Even if Iran – through its terrorists surrogates – carried out another 9/11 attack against it?

Will they share nuclear technology and materials with terrorist organizations, and attempt to carry out nuclear attacks by proxy?

Iran is and has been the leading source of terrorism around the world. If they obtain a nuclear weapons capability, you can only expect them to be more emboldened and feel more invulnerable to meaningful retaliation than they have ever felt before. President Ahmadinejad has said, “I Have a Connection With God, Since God Said That the Infidels Will Have No Way to Harm the Believers”; “We Have [Only] One Step Remaining Before We Attain the Summit of Nuclear Technology”; The West “Will Not Dare To Attack Us.”

Are you ready for that? Are you ready for the kind of hell that a rogue, terrorist, totalitarian, jihadist, and Armageddonist state could unleash upon the world given the impunity of being protected by nuclear weapons?

What are you willing to do to prevent that nightmarish scenario from occuring?

One thing is certain: we absolutely cannot count on diplomacy to prevent this catastrophic threat to world stability and security.

Russia and China – both veto-wielding permanent United Nations security council members – have both repeatedly disallowed any meaningful sanctions against Iran. I write about this in detail in an article.

There’s all kinds of evidence of their refusal to all for any sanctions that would have any chance of forcing Iran to comply.

From August 5, 2008:

The United States, Britain and France warned Monday — two days after the deadline expired — that they would press for additional sanctions against Iran if it did not respond positively and unambiguously to the offer. The six powers will hold a conference call Wednesday to consider their response to the statement. But they remain divided, with China and Russia reluctant to support tough sanctions.

“I don’t see any reason to believe that the Russians and the Chinese are any more willing today to support really tougher sanctions against Iran,” said Flynt Leverett, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and former Bush National Security Council staffer.

Iran is clearly more interested in becoming a nuclear power than it is in taking any of our carrots. And with the stick being removed from the proceedings, diplomacy simply has no chance of succeeding.

And we’ve seen all this before. I have written a three part series titled, “Iraq War Justified” that points to the fact the United States was placed in this exact same situation prior to 2003 (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3). A pitifully pathetic and corrupt United Nations was absolutely incapable of doing anything. The United States had good reasons to believe that Iraq was engaging in the illegal production of weapons of mass destruction, and inspectors were blocked from carrying out any meaningful inspection program. Iraq was able to use its abundant oil – and even the United Nations’ own oil for food program – to buy allies who would prevent the implementation of tough UN sanctions. And an attitude of anti-Americanism and a view that American influence should be siphoned away in favor of “a multi-polar world” (which is really just a cosmopolitan way of being anti-American) all combined to make it impossible for diplomacy to work in forcing Iraq to open itself up to inspections.

The United States was forced to attack Iraq because every other available option had failed, and we were not willing to allow the possibility of an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction.

When we attacked Iraq in the Gulf War, it was learned that Iraq was FAR closer to developing nuclear weapons than had ever previously been believed by Western “experts.” It was also realized that this threat – stopped in 1990 – carried through into the future:

In summary, the IAEA report says that following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq launched a “crash program” to develop a nuclear weapon quickly by extracting weapons grade material from safe-guarded research reactor fuel. This project, if it had continued uninterrupted by the war, might have succeeded in producing a deliverable weapon by the end of 1992. [PBS source: Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, a Guide in Maps and Charts, 1998, Rodney W. Jones and Mark G. NcDonough, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (1998). p. 191] …

Nuclear physicist and Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza agrees. He told FRONTLINE that Iraq did not relinquish certain critical components of the nuclear program to the inspectors, and that it retains the expertise necessary to build a nuclear weapon. He believes that Iraq may have one completed within the next couple of years.

Even now, the United Nations is questioning the intelligence pointing to Iran developing the bomb. How are we ever going to attain the “consensus” that liberals demand we have in this sort of perennially hazy political environment?

How can one condemn the Iraq attack and then sanction an Iran attack given all the similarities? On just what logical or moral basis?

It’s the exact same thing happening all over again, and Israel and the United States will be faced with the same choice: Are we willing to allow an Iran with doomsday capability? Are we willing to carry out an attack alone given a pathologically weak, corrupt, and frankly both pathetic and apathetic world?

This is the question that will effect – and possibly haunt – American foreign policy for generations to come.

If we elect Barack Obama, we are tacitly choosing to allow Iran to develop the bomb. Any of his tough-sounding rhetoric aside, you need to realize that Barack Obama has already repeatedly philosophically condemned the very same sort of preemptive attack that would be necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And he continues to do so even today. Just how was a preemptive attack on Iraq wrong if a preemptive attack on Iran is right? If Barack Obama believes that our intelligence will be flawless regarding Iran’s nuclear program when it was so flawed regarding Iraq’s program, then he is a genuine fool of the very worst kind. And if he refuses to attack until the evidence against Iran is certain, he is an even greater fool. For Iran would greet our attacking soldiers with mushroom clouds.

Israel is clearly doing far more than threatening to attack Iran in order to prevent this patently anti-Semitic and defiantly evil regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. It is clearly merely a matter of time, with many thinking that Israel might even attack prior to the change in American administrations. If and when they do, we will see just how vulnerable the Democrats have made us over the past thirty years in refusing to allow America to develop its own source of domestic oil as the price of oil goes up to over $300 a barrel and over $12 a gallon for gasoline.