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08/14/2005: '... deja vu all over again.' --Yogi Berra
Scary. Seriously scary. Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo:
First time as farce, second time as farce too?Well, we all know what happened the last time George W. "How do you know he's lying? His lips are moving" Bush said that force was a "last resort" in dealing with a middle eastern country.
With President Bush again stating that force is still on the table against Iran, albeit only as the last resort, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has kicked off his uphill reelection drive with an attack on President Bush's Middle Eastern belligerence.
All of this, of course, provides an uncanny replay of the build up to the US invasion of Iraq with the German Chancellor leveraging reelection on the axis of President Bush's warmongering.
The real scary thing is that when he did it the first time, he had an army that was at full strength and reasonably capable. Thanks to his own fuck-ups, he doesn't have that anymore.
There are days I smell a draft on the morning breeze. With luck, Dumbya has learned his lesson--that he is not, and never will be, the conquering "war president" that he wanted to be.
But we all know how well George W. "Gentleman's C" Bush seemed to learn his lessons.
UPDATE: According to the UK's Independent, an analysis of information available to the International Atomic Energy Agency shows that alleged evidence that Iran was ramping up a nuclear weapons program does not, in fact support that conclusion.
The UN nuclear watchdog is preparing to publish evidence that Iran is not engaged in a nuclear weapons programme, undermining a warning of possible military action from President George Bush.But then again, just look at the ramp-up to the Iraq war. As we all know, the would-be "war president" never let facts get in the way of a "good" war.
The US President told Israeli television that "all options are on the table" if Iran fails to comply with international calls to halt its nuclear programme. Both the US and Israel - the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power - were "united in our objective to make sure Iran does not have a weapon", he said.
However, Iran is about to receive a major boost from the results of a scientific analysis that will prove that the country's authorities were telling the truth when they said they were not developing a nuclear weapon. The discovery of traces of weapons-grade uranium in Iran by UN inspectors in August 2003 set off alarm bells in Western capitals where it was feared that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon under cover of a civil programme. The inspectors took the samples from Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, which had been concealed from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for 18 years.
But Iran maintained that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, and that the traces must have been contamination from the Pakistani-based black market network of scientist AQ Khan. He is the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
The analysis of components from Pakistan, obtained last May by the IAEA, is now almost complete and is set to conclude that the traces of weapons-grade uranium match those found in Iran. "The investigation is likely to show that they came from Pakistan," a Vienna-based diplomat told The Independent on Sunday.
Len on 08.14.05 @ 12:06 PM CST
