Dan

Calabrese

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December 10, 2007

Iran Report: Democrats, Ahmadinejad Celebrate Together

Two years ago, the National Intelligence Estimate – a rough consensus of the guesses of 16 different agencies – said with a high degree of certainty that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Now, the NIE says with a moderate degree of certainty that Iran “suspended” its nuclear program four years ago – or two years before the same people said they were certain of the opposite.

Following this? Let’s simplify it so as to get in line with the political storyline that has arisen from it:

“Nyah nyah! Bush doesn’t have an excuse to attack Iran!!!!”

In the days since the release of the new NIE, the president’s political adversaries have hardly been able to contain their glee. The NIE has so undercut his policy on Iran – that they will not get a nuclear weapon, no matter what the United States has to do to stop it – his opponents are now convinced he has been completely neutered on the matter.

The only person who might be happier than the Democrats and the mainstream media is Iran’s lunatic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who declared the NIE report a great victory for Iran. Now, it is presumed, Bush has no chance of persuading Russia and China to keep pressure on the Iranians, and he has no chance of getting political support for an attack against Iran.

Wow. Happy days are here again. Iran has been, and remains, a dangerous country with a dangerous regime at the helm – and the possibility that the president of the United States may be impotent in dealing with these people is inspiring cries of happy happy joy joy all over the country.

Something is not right here. National security is a serious matter, and the greatest threat to American national security is the procurement of nuclear weapons by hostile, unstable regimes. You don’t mess around with this. But many Americans, including almost the entire Democratic Party, seems to have lost its ability to take national security questions seriously. And most of the media is just as bad.

Ironic, isn’t it? Remember how, after 9/11, we were told that the attacks had “changed everything”? This supposedly meant that we would no longer turn a blind eye to threats, and we would no longer allow partisan silliness to divide us and divert our eyes while real storm clouds gathered.

What a joke that has become. If anything, the years following 9/11 have made us less serious than ever about national security. It has become more of a partisan question than ever before.

Much of the American left is invested in the idea that Iran is not a threat, and that we can live with a nuclear-armed Iran. When Ahmadinejad himself announced in 2005 that Israel should be wiped off the map, much of the left tried to explain away the comment by claiming he meant something else – and that he has no power anyway, because that rests with the successors to the Ayatollah Khomeini. And isn’t that comforting?

In the days following the liberation of Iraq, many Democrats attacked the invasion by arguing that Iraq was the wrong target because Iran was the far greater threat. Now that President Bush appears willing to attack Iran if necessary, suddenly Iran is not a threat either.

Is there any national security threat the left takes seriously? It challenges the mind to come up with a single one. If any threat is serious, then Bush might have an excuse to do something aggressive in response to the threat, therefore no threat is serious.

How else to explain why Bush’s critics are so gleeful over an NIE report that gives only the tiniest nod to the notion that Iran is not a threat? And it’s a very tiny nod. The report, primarily authored by three Bush critics within the national security bureaucracy, acknowledges that the Iranians are still trying to enrich uranium. That’s how you make the fuel for nuclear weapons, and that’s the hardest part. As long as you’re working on making the fuel, the “suspended” weapons program could be restarted any time. But never mind that. No threat can be acknowledged as serious, because that may hand Bush a political advantage.

The strangest application of this phenomenon is the popular liberal fiction that presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani never talks about anything but 9/11. Giuliani’s message is actually quite well-rounded, but why would Democrats consider it an effective criticism that the man whose city was attacked on 9/11 mentions it on the campaign trail?

Have we decided as a nation that 9/11 is yesterday’s news and is not relevant to the presidential campaign of 2008? More than that, it seems that one entire party and much of the news media have decided that any serious consideration of a national security issue is illegitimate, and that any chance to make a serious matter look ridiculous is welcome.

What the NIE report, and the consequent reaction, have demonstrated is not that Iran isn’t dangerous, but that an entire group of Americans can’t be trusted to take dangerous situations seriously.

This is Column # DC133.  Request permission to publish here.