hehehehe... Even NYT is showing signs of Chicken Hawkishness
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NY Times
November 20, 2004
EDITORIAL
Groundhog Day
Stop us if you've heard this one before. The Bush administration
creates a false sense of urgency about a nuclear menace from a Middle
Eastern country. Hard-liners talk about that country's connections to
terrorists. They portray European diplomatic efforts to defuse
tensions as a feckless attempt to appease a rogue nation whose word
can never be trusted anyway. Secretary of State Colin Powell makes
ominous-sounding warnings about new intelligence, which turns out to
be dubious.
That is how President Bush rushed the country into an unnecessary
conflict with Iraq in his first term, and we have been seeing alarming
signs of that approach all week on Iran.
Let's be cleareyed about this: Iran has an active nuclear program, has
not tried terribly hard to hide it and has been dishonest in its
dealings with the West. But nothing we have seen suggests some new,
urgent development in Iran that would impel American officials to
start talking about "the military option." In fact, the most recent
developments have been encouraging. Last week, under the threat of a
looming U.N. deadline, Tehran said it would freeze all uranium and
plutonium processing and invite back international inspectors.
It was a welcome step, resulting from efforts by Britain, France and
Germany, and signaled that even the hard-liners in Tehran are
susceptible to economic appeals. If the negotiations over Iran's
nuclear programs go well, Europe promises to resume talks on a
preferential trade agreement. If they don't, it will be time for
international economic sanctions. After meeting with British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Bush went out of his way to praise and
endorse the Europeans' efforts.
But on Wednesday, Mr. Powell suddenly offered scary sounding talk
about new intelligence that supposedly showed that Iran was not only
working on enriching uranium, a big step toward making a bomb, but was
also working on ways to attach such a weapon to a missile. His
alarmist tone was a bit puzzling, since everyone has already agreed
that Iran has nuclear ambitions, and it's hard to imagine a country
wanting to own a nuclear bomb without exploring ways to use it. The
world has also known for years that Iran was testing guided missiles.
Puzzlement turned to alarm yesterday when The Washington Post reported
that Mr. Powell's comments were based on unverified information that
had been brought to the United States by a previously unknown source
whose reliability and authenticity had not yet been vetted. That
certainly did bring back old memories - of Mr. Powell assuring the
world that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, based on fanciful
intelligence reports about aluminum tubes.
Steven Weisman of The Times reported that administration hawks were
also talking about fresh intelligence on Iran's support for Hezbollah,
which the world has known about for decades, and Iran's support for
insurgents in Iraq, another old story. The hawks seem to be already
starting to throw cold water on the prospects for a negotiated
solution to the Iranian nuclear problem while trying to open the door
to contemplating a military option. An administration official told
The Times that Mr. Powell was trying to avoid meeting with the Iranian
foreign minister at a conference both men are to attend in Egypt next
week.
Small wonder, then, that the Europeans started to accuse Washington of
trying to undermine diplomacy with Iran, just as the Bush
administration thwarted their efforts to resume the U.N. inspections
of Iraq - inspections that we now know had been highly effective.
Iran has long been a target of the hawks in the administration, who
are undoubtedly feeling their oats after the election. But we hope
that President Bush has learned enough from the Iraq adventure to
understand the dangers of using flawed intelligence to create a false
sense of urgency about a national security threat.
Obviously, a nuclear-armed Iran run by its current brand of
extremists, who have twisted religion to support terrorism, would be a
cause for real concern. But there is no military solution here. Iran's
scattered and secretive nuclear program cannot be bombed out of
existence. And even if the United States had not stretched its
military to the limit in Iraq, invading Iran, a country of nearly 70
million people, would be a catastrophic mistake.
The Bush administration has said that stopping the proliferation of
nuclear weapons is at the top of its foreign policy agenda. That's
where it belongs. But it's a goal that can be pursued only through
truly multilateral diplomacy, in which the United States works with
its European allies, rather than trying to undermine them, and the
Europeans are prepared to stand behind Washington with a credible
threat of economic sanctions when they are justified. It is not an
excuse for war or even for pretending that war is a rational option.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/20/opinion/20sat1.html?oref=login
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