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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Repeat After Me: Iran is Not a Threat.

Or so says the man who was right about Iraq's non-existent WMD.

[Mohammed] ElBaradei said force should be used only when all diplomatic options have failed, adding there was plenty of time for diplomacy, sanctions, dialogue and incentives to bear fruit.

"I want to get people away from the idea that Iran will be a threat from tomorrow, and that we are faced right now with the issue of whether Iran should be bombed or allowed to have the bomb," the Nobel peace prize winner said.

"We are not at all in that situation. Iraq is a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than solving it."

Once again, it's bait-and-switch time. It's a double whammy - baiting us with Iraq, then switching to Iran; and baiting us with Joe Wilson, but switching to Valerie Plame.

Ms. Plame, in conjunction with the release of her book, Fair Game, has just disclosed that she was working on tracking Iran's nuclear intentions when her identity as an undercover CIA agent was leaked to the press by the Bushies. Common wisdom at the time was that the Bushies went after her to retaliate against her husband, who had just written an article stating that Bush's claims that Iraq was seeking nuclear material from Niger were patently false.

There was no question that this article was potentially extremely damaging to the pro-invasion cause. Ambassador Wilson's credentials were impeccable and he would be difficult to discredit. However, many have speculated that the true target of the leak was Ms. Plame herself.

George W. Bush made his "axis of evil" speech on January 29, 2002, long before the invasion of Iraq - and when Iran was led by the moderate President Khatami. Clearly, Iran was on Bush's mind. But why? Then as now, there was no indication at that time that Iran had any intention to attack America (or any other country), and Ahmadinejad, with his inflammatory anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric, was not the President.

Just as Alan Greenspan has admitted that Iraq was about oil (and, I would add, PNAC dreams of a world united under the American Empire), it seems obvious that the desire of many Bushies to attack Iran is about the same things.

Knowing that the desires for oil and power are not acceptable reasons to attack a country that has not attacked us, is it not possible that Bush and his cabal knew that Ms. Plame and her group were gathering intelligence that would disprove future claims of Iranian nuclear prowess? And that they acted to disable one of the CIA's most valuable assets before it could report that Iran had no nuclear weapons, just as Mohammed ElBaradei claims?

Ms. Plame herself believes the target of the Bushies' malevolence was indeed her husband and that she was just "collateral damage." Yet at the end of the interview, as reported by Raw Story, Ms. Plame said the following:

"I hope," said Plame, "that the American people have learned the lesson to pay close attention to what their leaders are saying and try to educate themselves and get as much information before we rush heading again into a disastrous war based on twisted intelligence."

Wouldn't it be so much easier to educate ourselves if we had Ms. Plame's reports on Iran's lack of nuclear weapons?

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