Logic Out The Window At The White House

Bolton knew his words would be leaked, so maybe it was just deliberate posturing to raise the pressure on Iran. But on Sunday, addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, Bolton repeated the threat: “The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve… We must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat…” He may really mean it -- and no one in the White House has told him to shut up. With the U.S. army already mired in Iraq, the Bush administration lacks the ground strength to invade Iran, a far larger country. The National Security Strategy statement of September 2002 declared a new doctrine of “preemptive” wars in which the U.S. would launch unprovoked attacks against countries that it feared might hurt it in the future, and in January 2003 that doctrine was elaborated into the military strategy of “full spectrum global strike.” The “full spectrum” referred specifically to the use of nuclear weapons to destroy hardened targets that ordinary weapons cannot reach. Earth-penetrating “mini-nukes” were an integral part of Conplan 8022-02, a presidential directive signed by Bush at the same time that covered attacks on countries allegedly posing an “imminent” nuclear threat in which no American ground troops would be used. Indeed, the responsibility for carrying out Conplan 8022 was given to Strategic Command (Stratcom) in Omaha, a military command that had previously dealt only with nuclear weapons. Last May, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an “Interim Global Strike Alert Order” putting Stratcom on high military readiness 24 hours a day. Logic says there is no “imminent” danger of Iranian nuclear weapons: last year’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate put the time needed for Iran to develop such weapons at ten years. But experience says that this administration can talk itself into a “preemptive” attack on a country that really does not pose any threat at all. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12261.htm

Note: http://www.informationc...