Iraqn

Do they even need another terrorist attack to blame on Iran?

With Iran asserting its nuclear independence over the last few days, does the Bush administration see new opportunities to foment a crisis?

Atrios has a couple of posts that are just so quotable I'm going to go ahead and quote them:

Iran and Roll
Gonna be deja vu all over again. Fortunately the script has already been written and all it takes is a find&replace command to switch q for n.

Time to start betting on when the force authorization vote will happen.

There won't be a war, but there will be lots of war talk.

How It Goes
Winter/Spring - The clone army of foreign policy "experts" from conservative foreign policy outfits nobody ever heard of before suddenly appear on all the cable news programs all the time, frowning furiously and expressing concerns about the "grave threat" that Iran poses. Never before heard of Iranian exile group members start appearing regularly, talking about their role in the nuclear program and talking up Iran's human rights violations.

Spring/Summer - "Liberal hawks" point out that all serious people understand the serious threat posed by serious Iran, and while they acknowledge grudgingly that the Bush administration has fucked up everything it touches, they stress, and I mean stress, that we really must support the Bush administration's serious efforts to deal with the serious problem and that criticisms of such serious approaches to a serious problem are highly irresponsible and come only from irrational very unserious Bush haters who would rather live in Iran than the U.S.

Late Summer - Rumsfeld denies having an Iran war plan "on his desk." He refuses to answer if he has one "in his file cabinet." Andy Card explains that you don't roll out new product until after labor day.

Early Fall - Bush suddenly demands Congress give him the authority to attack Iran to ensure they "disarm." Some Democrats have the temerity to ask "with what army?" Marshall Wittman and Peter Beinart explain that courageous Democrats will have the courageous courage to be serious and to confront the "grave threat" with seriousness and vote to send other peoples' kids off to war, otherwise they'll be seen as highly unserious on national security. Neither enlists.

Late October - Despite the fact that all but 30 Democrats vote for the resolution, Republicans run a national ad campaign telling voters that Democrats are objectively pro-Ahmadinejad. Glenn Reynolds muses, sadly, that Democrats aren't just anti-war, but "on the other side." Nick Kristof writes that liberals must support the war due to Ahmadinejad's opposition to gay rights in Iran.

Election Day - Democrats lose 5 seats in the Senate, 30 in the House. Marshall Wittman blames it on the "pro-Iranian caucus."

The Day After Election Day - Miraculously we never hear another word about the grave Iranian threat. Peter Beinart writes a book about how serious Democrats must support the liberation of Venezuela and Bolivia.

Now I'd like to take up the exercise Atrios suggests. All Gerson and the crack Bush speechwriters will have to do is open the September/October 2002 archives and then cut and paste. Here's an example of how to do it, from the Bush UN speech of September 12, 2002:

Today, Iraqn continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraqn employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraqn has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraqn acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.

There's plenty more text just like it to lift and re-purpose. A striking thing here is the notion that no ginned-up provocation supposedly by Iran, no bombardment, and certainly no full-scale invasion of Iran will be necessary for a hyperbolic Iran crisis to work politically for the Republicans in the November US mid-term Congressional elections. Can we pretty much forget about the insider discussion of an Iran war plan I posted about last July? If Republican domestic political goals are achieved without bombing, or with very limited bombing of Iran, would that not be preferred, seeing how the US military has it's hands full next door in a country 1/3 the size?

Why Iran might want nukes
I don't know, of course, but it is not hard to imagine threats to Iranian national security from the Iranian point of view. First, there is no way Iran would use a nuke in a first strike, or give one to terrorists to use against the US or Israel. It would be suicidal for them. Despite the provocative tones directed against Israel by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they are probably just as concerned as anyone about terrorist use of nukes. No matter who would do it, the weight of the response would fall on Iran.

But from the Iranian point of view, deterrence must be quite another matter, right? Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed squarely at Iran, just a few hundred kilometers away. And Lord knows how many nuclear tipped devices have been brought in by the Americans, right next door.

I tried very briefly to research that last point. Maybe there has been something out there in the last couple years, but today I found little on the question of US nukes in Iraq. I challenge readers to find at least a denial or maybe a ``neither confirm nor deny'' quote on this.