2006 November 19 | Hanlon's Razor

CIA: No evidence for Iranian Nukes

By Hanlon, on November 19th, 2006 at 08:21 PM

I’ve already said this, but I like finding out things officially. A CIA report has coming out detailing Iran’s attempts to get a nuclear weapon. Specifically: they aren’t attempting to get a nuclear weapon.

“The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running paallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story.

A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis and said the White House had been hostile to it, he wrote.

Cheney and his aides had discounted the assessment, the official said.

No surprises there. Oh yeah, Cheney. What does he say about this? I hear he might want to start up a war in Iran, despite no evidence of WMDs for the second goddamn time.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions “and thus stop Congress from getting in its way,” he said.

Great. This is the presidency America elected (sort of). A veep who doesn’t care about Congress, they just want to push their own agendas through.

Kissinger: Iraq military victory is “impossible”

By Hanlon, on November 19th, 2006 at 03:15 PM

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Henry Nixon-and-Vietnam Kissinger, but I do concede he’s a brilliant man. So I tend to take this take on the odds of victory in Iraq to be worth my consideration.

“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq’s neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict.”

A dramatic collapse of Iraq – whatever we think about how the situation was created – would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region,” he said.

And there we see the true disaster this Iraq War has become. Not only is it impossible to win at this point, but we can’t leave without the country falling apart. To use a terrible, terribly overused pun, we are truly between a rock (Iraq) and a hard place. It’s a scary thought that where we’re at may be the best we can hope for in the area any time soon.

So now it’s going to come down to the Democrats. They have to deal with what may be considered the most bungled war in America’s history, beyond Vietnam even, and they have to make it work or they will be politically decimated in 2008. Maybe that was the plan all along: republicans knew it was a failure and let the Dems take the fall.

That’s a little paranoid for me, though.