The Manichean Paranoia Patch

Just when I thought I couldn’t take our President any less seriously, it turns out that Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003. What’s worse, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell had this information in August, months before Bush started escalating the rhetoric and tossing out such exciting statements as “World War III” to describe the explosive potential of the situation. Here he is being questioned by reporters about the details of this miscommunication.

In short, either this administration has the worst internal communication of any in U.S. history, or the President deliberately misled the American people about the nuclear potential of yet another Middle Eastern country. Oh, and Bush is still insisting on aggressive rhetoric because, “What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”

I think we can all agree that Ahmadinejad is basically the Middle Eastern Hitler. He scares the heck out of me whenever he talks about Israel. But we shouldn’t be talking about the potential of attacking a country based on the possibility of them starting nuclear research. Every country on Earth has the potential to start nuclear research. Experts say that even if Iran restarted their nuclear program today, it wouldn’t be anywhere near ready to produce a nuclear weapon until at least the next decade at the earliest. And when we use aggressive rhetoric, what are we actually asking them to do? If they’ve already stopped their nuclear program, that doesn’t leave much room for further… stoppage.

We should remain alert about Iran and be wary of any future attempts to obtain nuclear weapons either directly or through research. But perhaps we also ought to take things back a notch on the aggressive stance. Or at least, take the phrase “World War Three” out of the conversation.