Want a foolproof plan for causing a nuclear holocaust? It’s pretty simple, get Bush to start a war with Iran. The only problem, though, is that Iran seems to want to cause just that. They’re just taunting the world with uranium enrichment now. That said, they’re at least agreeable about it.
“We have always signified our willingness to allow (U.N. nuclear watchdog) inspectors to come to Iran and visit our nuclear sites. If there are still questions and ambiguities that need to be answered, then these should be answered,” he said.
Of course, that’s presupposing that the watchdogs are shown all of the sites, that it isn’t a ruse to get them to think all’s well while secret sites are operating. Which, whether or not it’s true, will probably be amongst the reasons we go to war in October just in time for the elections.
That’s the big question, then, isn’t it? Okay, Iran is clearly enriching uranium and that’s going to be used for something. Is it for weapons? Is it for power? The humanitarian in me wants to believe the latter, the faintly paranoid guy in me believes the former.
So of course Bush has been pushing the UN to do something about it, which means some inspection.
The U.N. Security Council has told Iran to halt all sensitive atomic activities and on March 29 asked its watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to report on Iranian compliance in 30 days.
So far the IAEA says it cannot verify Iran’s nuclear programme is entirely peaceful, despite three years of probing, but has found no hard proof of efforts to build atomic weapons.
Three years of investigations and no proof of even effort to build atomic weapons, let alone anything more concrete than that. You see, despite what Bush and the media might want us to believe, the enrichment of uranium alone doesn’t mean intent to build atomic weapons. Remember that Iran is around ten years away from a nuclear bomb currently.
You can ponder for yourself why the administration won’t talk about that report. I’m impressed this one came to light so early. Rather than believe a report like that, we have horror reports cropping up, such as one that Iran could get a nuke in 16 days if they wanted to.
“Natanz was constructed to house 50,000 centrifuges,” Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow. “Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days.”
Oh, okay. So they aren’t at a state where they could make enough uranium in 16 days yet. And that’s only making enough uranium for a nuclear bomb, it says nothing about whether or not they have the technology for the actual device yet. But if at some point down the road they have all of the machines built and have the ability to create the bomb itself, they could make enough uranium to put in it in around 16 days!
I wonder how long it takes the United States to make a new nuclear weapon.
So we’re really left between a rock and a hard place, here. We’ve got Iran saying they’re meaning this for entirely peaceful purposes. Then we have Bush and his friends saying that Iran is going to drop nuclear bombs on Israel and everyone you love as soon as they can. Who are we supposed to believe? Can we believe either of them? Both?
I can’t imagine Iran will never go for a nuke. It just doesn’t seem likely at all. The country wants one desparately, which I can honestly understand. They’re a target of the country with more atomic weapons than anyone else in the world as well as some nuclear-armed friends. That said, I cannot imagine they’d be so overt about it. You’d think Iran would pretend to have so few sites, then build the rest in secret. Of course, it’s our intelligence saying that Iran is going for the 54,000 so we’ll see what becomes of that.
We’re still in Iraq, we’re still in Afghanistan, al Qaeda still exists and Iraq can’t settle on who they want leading the country thanks to a civil war. Bush wants to move his ass into Iran. I really, really want to know where the part is that tells us why he won’t completely screw up once again?
Folks, Iraq, no matter what anyone says, was not a threat. There weren’t WMDs, those bio labs weren’t real, we were in no danger. The country ain’t that big and Saddam didn’t put up any resistance (talk to your local marines, they’ll verify how easy it was to drive right through). It hardly matters outside of the in-Iraq casualties that Bush totally botched the war because the country couldn’t do jack. How many of the deaths were insurgent-caused? Almost all?
Now imagine if that same leadership put our military, and don’t kid yourself this won’t be an “air-only” operation, into Iran. Iran won’t just sit there and watch our soldiers driving around. They aren’t going to crumble in two weeks, they’ll actually fight back. And when it’s all over, the insurgency will be far larger.
Guided by Bush, Iran will be a disaster so big people will only look at Iraq as the precursor to it, rather than the big disaster itself.
No matter what, this will come to a head soon and it’s going to get ugly. Iran hits Israel, Israel hits back, next thing you know we really do have that nuclear war the movies have always talked about. I wonder what Australia is like to live in. They seem far away enough that the direct blasts wouldn’t get me, so I’d just be able to sit back and enjoy the nuclear winter.
[tags]Iran, Iraq, George Bush, war, nuclear weapons, uranium, enrichment, terrorism, disaster, Israel[/tags]
