Inexorable march toward war with Iran?

[babylonsister]

Inexorable march toward war with Iran?
By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Wednesday, October 31, 2007


There were some things far more frightening this week than Halloween's small ghouls and goblins — and the scariest of all is the Bush administration's seemingly inexorable march toward military confrontation with Iran.

What ARE they smoking back there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? The very idea is dumb as a fencepost and best left to the biggest pied piper of what passes for neo-conservative thought, Norman Podhoretz. Yet both President George W. Bush and his able assistant, Vice President Darth Cheney, are marching to that tune and humming along lustily.

There is no crisis here, and no earthly reason to manufacture one on short notice, except for the fact that in under 15 months the Bush administration will pass ignominiously into history. Then a new chief executive can begin dealing with two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a national debt nearing $10 trillion, a terrorist threat to America only made stronger by eight years of Bush and Cheney, and a national economy trembling on the brink of recession.

As though that weren't a big enough mess to leave behind, like so much trash in an abandoned trailer home, these brilliant thinkers want to bequeath a third and far more dangerous war to whoever is unlucky enough to win the ongoing tussle of midgets that passes for a presidential contest.

There are two questions here: Why? And, why now?

Yes, the centrifuges are whirling away in Iran's deeply buried and widely dispersed nuclear facilities, enriching uranium that can be used to power electric generation plants and, it's true, can also be used to build nuclear weapons.

But most analysts say that even if Iran's ultimate ambition is to build a nuclear weapon, it will take them another five or six years before they get there. Some say even longer.

more...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/21002.html

[shain from kane]

1. Does inexorable mean what I think it means? n/t

[babylonsister]

3. I can't help you til you tell me what you think it means. nt

[shain from kane]

4. We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed. n/t

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Why? Because * simply intends to "spend (his) political capital"

before he leaves office.

[abq e streeter]

5. We'd be a lot better off if they really were "smoking something"

instead of getting drunk on power.