- The latest National Intelligence Estimate has been greeted
by a mixture of relief and alarm. As I have been saying all along, Iran
indeed poses no quantifiable imminent nuclear threat to us or her neighbors.
It is with much alarm, however, that we see the administration continue
to ratchet up the war rhetoric as if nothing has changed.
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- Indeed nothing has changed from the administration's
perspective, as they have had this latest intelligence report for some
time. Only this week has it been made known to the public. They want it
both ways with Iran. On the one hand, they discredit the report entirely,
despite it being one of the most comprehensive intelligence reports on
the subject, with over 1,000 source notes in the document. On the other
hand, when discrediting it fails, they claim that the timing of the abandonment
of the weapons program, just as we were invading Iraq, means our pressure
must have worked, so we must keep it up with a new round of even tougher
sanctions. Russia and China are not buying this, apparently, and again
we are finding ourselves on a lonely, tenuous platform on the world stage.
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- The truth is Iran is being asked to do the logically
impossible feat of proving a negative. They are being presumed guilty until
proven innocent because there is no evidence with which to indict them.
There is still no evidence that Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, has ever violated the treaty's terms and the terms clearly
state that Iran is allowed to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful civilian
energy needs. The United States cannot unilaterally change the terms of
the treaty, and it is unfair and unwise diplomatically to impose sanctions
for no legitimate reason.
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- Are we to think that Iran hasn't noticed the duplicitous
treatment being received by so-called nuclear threats around the globe?
If they have been paying attention, and I think they have, they would see
that if countries do have a nuclear weapon, they tend to be left alone,
or possibly get a subsidy, but if they do not gain such a weapon then we
threaten them. Why wouldn't they want to pursue a nuclear weapon if that
is our current foreign policy? The fact remains, there is no evidence they
actually have one, or could have one any time soon, even if they immediately
resumed a weapons program.
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- Our badly misguided foreign policy has already driven
this country's economy to the brink of bankruptcy with one war based on
misinformation. It is unthinkable that despite the lack of any evidence
of a threat, some are still charging headstrong into yet another war in
the Middle East when what we ought to be doing is coming home from Iraq,
coming home from Korea, coming home from Germany, and defending our own
soil. We do not need to be interfering in the internal affairs of other
countries and waging war when honest trade, friendship, and diplomacy are
the true paths to peace and prosperity.
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