[BRIGADE] PJB: Did Bibi Box Obama In?
Published: Fri, 05/22/09
By Patrick J. Buchanan
May 22, 2009
On Sept. 20, 2002, as the War Party was beating the drum for
preventive war on Iraq, lest we wake up to "a mushroom cloud over
an American city," The Wall Street Journal introduced an eminent
voice to confirm that, yes, Saddam was driving straight for an
atomic bomb.
"This is a dictator who is ... feverishly trying to acquire nuclear
weapons," wrote Bibi Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel.
"Saddam's nuclear program has changed. He no longer needs one large
reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs.
He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that
can be hidden throughout the country -- and Iraq is a very big
country. Even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover
these portable manufacturing sites of mass death. ...
"(I)f action is not taken now, we will all be threatened by a much
greater peril ... (for) no gas mask and no vaccine can protect
against nuclear weapons."
This was horse manure of a high grade, as high as that which
Richard Perle deposited on the podium of the Foreign Policy
Research Institute a year earlier, when he informed a stunned
audience that Saddam "is busily at work on a nuclear weapon."
Perle had it straight from Saddam's "Bomb Maker," "a man named
Kadir Hamza." Hamza, said Perle, told him that after the Osirak
reactor was destroyed by Israel in 1981, Saddam "began to build
uranium enrichment facilities, many facilities, and we built 400 of
them, and they're all over the country. Some of them look like
farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look
like warehouses. You'll never find them. They don't turn out much,
but every day they turn out a little bit of nuclear materials."
"So," Perle warned his riveted audience, "it's simply a matter of
time before he acquires nuclear weapons."
Washing-machine centrifuges in uranium enrichment facilities
disguised as barns and chicken coops! And Americans believed it.
And so we were stampeded into war against a nation that did not
threaten or attack us, to strip it of weapons it did not even have.
That war has cost 4,500 American dead and 35,000 wounded. It has
brought death to perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis. Four million
people have been driven from their homes, 2 million, including half
the Christians, into exile. Hundreds of thousands of fatherless
Iraqi children are being raised by women widowed by that war.
Undaunted, the War Party has a new war planned for us.
Target: Tehran. And Obama may just have boxed himself in.
In return for Bibi's willingness to talk to the Palestinians, Obama
agreed to a December deadline for progress in talks with Iran. If
the talks are not fruitful by then, America will step on the
escalator.
"I've been very clear that I don't take any options off the table
with respect to Iran," said the president.
Bibi got what he came for.
By setting a six-month deadline, Obama has given an incentive to
Israel, AIPAC, the neocons and even al-Qaida, which wants Shia Iran
bombed back to the stone age, to provoke collisions with Iran,
until December, then demand that Obama keep his word, suspend
talks, impose severe sanctions and start us on the escalator to war.
And, already, the incidents are multiplying.
Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, has charged the
United States with complicity in cross-border attacks from
Kurdistan. Israel threatens Iran almost daily and practices bombing
runs to Greece and Gibraltar. Iran says it can destroy Israel and
tests a missile that can hit that nation.
Israel claims Iran is trucking weapons into Gaza via Sudan. But how
the trucks get through Egypt, cross the Red Sea and Sinai, then
pass through Israeli and Egyptian checkpoints is unexplained.
Hillary Clinton yesterday called an Iranian nuclear capability an
"extraordinary threat" and said the U.S. goal is "to persuade the
Iranian regime that they will actually be less secure if they
proceed with their nuclear weapons program."
Query: What nuclear weapons program?
According to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, Iran
halted its weapons program in 2003. Nor are there any reports of
the diversion of Iran's industrial-grade uranium from Natanz or
evidence of any secret centrifuge cascade to enrich it to weapons
grade.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the EastWest Institute of
Russian and U.S. scientists says Tehran is "at least six years away
from building a deliverable nuclear weapon," and a Rand Corp. study
says that Iran's "ability to wreak havoc in the Middle East through
surrogates is exaggerated."
Iran represents no threat to the United States to justify a war.
And as Korea finished Harry Truman, Vietnam finished LBJ, and Iraq
finished the Bush Republicans, war with Iran would make Barack --
with the situations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq all
deteriorating -- a one-term president.
Barack had best understand. The crowd manipulating him into war
with Iran has in mind, first, obliterating Iran; second, getting
rid of him.